44 By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies are sometimes described as operating as a global filing system, which allocates each person to at least one state, thereby providing a return address for other states. This optimises a receiving state’s power to deport noncitizens (Macklin 2015:231). The notion of Rohingya as ‘unremovable’ due to their statelessness drives many of the concerns for states hosting Rohingya refugee and migrant worker populations, and shapes international relations. Following the mass expulsions of Rohingya to Bangladesh in 2017, for example, Bangladesh simultaneously condemned Myanmar’s human rights record in relation to Rohingya and attempted to force Myanmar’s hand to repatriate them whilst the violence was ongoing (Brinham 2017; Crisp 2018). Likewise, in Malaysia and Thailand, concerns over the refugee flows and ‘maritime movements’ of Rohingya since 2006 relate to their un-removability which has led to many being trapped in indefinite detention (Equal Rights Trust 2010). Statist concerns about Rohingya’s statelessness as un-removability have often overridden concerns about individuals’ access to human rights, resulting in a lack of durable solutions for Rohingya refugees and situations of protracted displacement and inter-generational statelessness outside Myanmar (Maung Thein Shwe, Field et al. 2021). Statelessness as a human rights issue Statelessness as a human rights concern rose in prominence in the post-war years. As Spiro (2011: 698) explained: Only with the dawn of the human rights revolution in the mid-twentieth century did international law come tentatively to pose an alternate conception of nationality, one that took rights into account- but even then, only in ways that minimally affected the identity function of national rules. Negotiations around the right to nationality in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) were centred around notions of legal personhood and concerns over the universality of human rights (Siegelberg 2020). Whilst in theory rights should apply to everyone by virtue of being human, in reality the right to nationality provided access to most other rights, hence the inclusion of Article 15 (1) in the UDHR. Human rights literature points out that the human rights framework has developed significantly since the post-war years and that the framework relating to noncitizens and individual human rights has strengthened considerably (Lawrance and Stevens 2017:7). Despite this, there is still an almost universal understanding that a lack of citizenship continues to have a severe impact on the enjoyment of broader human rights (Belton 2015:36). As such, the right to a nationality or citizenship is considered a fundamental human right and provisions relating to nationality and the prevention and reduction of statelessness are contained in a series of other human rights instruments.18