Comment on the Zhao Case
the Status of Stateless Persons lays out the duties owed to stateless persons, among
them, to facilitate their naturalisation.16
While many non-parties to the 1961 Convention in the MENA have safeguards
against statelessness at birth in their nationality laws, their efficacy is limited.17
These provisions allow access to nationality in a narrower set of circumstances
than the 1961 Convention, requiring that one or both parents be stateless or of
unknown nationality for a child to receive the nationality of the country of the
child’s birth. Some states that maintain gender unequal nationality transmission
provide legislative safeguards to protect children who are born to a citizen mother
against statelessness in cases where the father’s identity or whereabouts is
unknown. In practice, however, these safeguards are rarely implemented.18
Limited data on statelessness in the region is another barrier to strategic
litigation around nationality rights.19 Where a state does not recognise the need to
collect data on a particular category within its population, civil society and IGOs
can sometimes cover the gap, but in the MENA, such actors often face challenges.
The challenges are in part due to the absence of a codified definition of
statelessness alongside the political sensitivity of researching the issue in contexts
with sizable minority groups without nationality.20
Zhao’s representatives and the HRC could draw on a ‘mapping study on
statelessness in the Netherlands, a years-long effort ... and careful documentation
of statelessness in the Netherlands and regionally by the European Network on
Statelessness and its members’.21 Given that no such in-depth mapping study has
been carried out in the MENA states, and that a regional network — the MENA
Statelessness Network (Hawiati) — was only established in mid-2020, the
architecture to support strategic litigation in the MENA region is relatively
limited.22 The absence of data highlights a crucial regional distinction in the role
of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) in the MENA
region. While in Europe UNHCR has carried out or commissioned numerous
‘Mapping Statelessness’ studies, 23 to date only one such exercise has been carried
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September
1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960) art 32 (‘1954 Convention’).
For a discussion on how Arab states’ nationality codes protect against statelessness for
children born on their territory, see Gianluca Parolin, Citizenship in the Arab World: Kin,
Religion and Nation-State (Amsterdam University Press 2009) 99–100.
Laura van Waas, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Nationality Laws in the MENA Region’
(Research Paper, Tilburg University Statelessness Programme, September 2014) 31–32, 38–39;
Betsy L Fisher, ‘Gender Discrimination and Statelessness in the Gulf Cooperation Council
States’ (2016) 23(2) Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 269, 284.
Zahra Albarazi and Thomas McGee, ‘Introducing “Hawiati”: A Network for Stateless Solidarity
in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)’, European Network on Statelessness (Web Page,
21 January 2021) <https://www.statelessness.eu/updates/blog/introducing-hawiati-networkstateless-solidarity-middle-east-and-north-africa-mena> (‘Introducing “Hawiati”’).
Laura van Waas and Zahra Albarazi (eds), Nationality and Cases of Statelessness in the
Middle East and North Africa (The Legal Agenda 2016) 10–11, 208–213.
Bingham and Klaas (n 4).
‘Introducing “Hawiati”’ (n 19).
These include: the Netherlands (2011), United Kingdom (2011), Belgium (2012), Malta (2014),
Norway (2015), Estonia (2016), Lithuania (2016), Sweden (2016), Austria (2017), Albania (2018),
Portugal (2018), Denmark (2019), Poland (2019) and Czech Republic (2020).
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