EVALUATION OF UNHCR-LED INITIATIVES TO END STATELESSNESS – FINAL REPORT – VOLUME I Child, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 19 4.2 Key drivers of statelessness 29. The causes of statelessness include discrimination, conflicts between or gaps in nationality laws, state succession, and border or sovereignty disputes. A lack of birth registration and / or documentation can also leave people unable to prove their nationality, and thus be put at risk of statelessness 20, sometimes compounded over generations due to lack of awareness regarding its importance. 30. Discrimination linked with statelessness can be based on ethnic, gender, racial, or religious factors, and can be enshrined in law, or simply prevalent in government policies and practices, and social norms. UNHCR estimates that more than 75 percent of the world’s known stateless belong to a minority group. 21 Unwanted groups can be denationalized or stripped of their nationality 22 and arbitrarily deprived of their citizenship.23 Denationalization and restrictive citizenship often expose these groups to violence, human rights abuses24 and hinder human dignity.25 Children and women are often most at risk of statelessness due to inadequate or poor implementation of citizenship laws or discriminatory attitudes.26 31. Statelessness also arises in migration and forced displacement contexts. A stateless person can be a migrant, a refugee or an internally displaced person, as well as a victim of human trafficking.27 The connection between statelessness and displacement may occur because of discrimination, loss of identity documentation and in some cases arbitrary deprivation of nationality. 28 The ability to obtain identity documents such as birth certificates 29 is a critical step to proving individual citizenship.30 32. Statelessness also affects nomadic and travelling groups due to the lack of habitual residence or fixed address required to acquire legal status for conferring citizenship. 31 Indigenous groups have often been affected by statelessness because some States claim territory where traditional or tribal societies have resided for centuries but are unable or unwilling to modify the boundary of their reserved domain for indigenous inhabitants.32 33. In times of States’ formation/succession or adoption of new nationality law, some individuals may be unaware of or unable to acquire national identity document despite eligibility. Often, lack of identity documentation is due to administrative problems related to inefficient practices, excessive fees, or unreasonable application deadlines. 33 4.3 Historical global storyline 34. Since 2001 UNHCR’s statelessness role and activities have evolved significantly. Based on key informant interviews and the desk review, four phases were identified which reflect UNHCR’s engagement and leadership of statelessness initiatives as outlined below. Phase 1: 2001-2007: Creating political momentum 35. A 2001 evaluation of UNHCR’s statelessness role and activities provides a comprehensive account of the situation at the time.34 In 1995 the ExCom reaffirmed UNHCR’s mandate for the prevention and reduction of statelessness but the evaluation found that the institution relied on a sole Senior Legal Officer in DIP to support this mandate. The evaluation noted increasing demand for services, challenges to respond at scale, and recommended the creation of a statelessness unit with three posts and its own budget. 19 Ibid. Ibid. 21 UNHCR, “Introduction to nationality and statelessness – UNHCR HQ Training” May 2019. 22 Ibid. Page 22. 23 LE, Van Waas. L. (2008). Nationality matters: statelessness under international law. Page 95. See also 23 UNHCR Global Trends 2018. 24 Kingston, L. N. (2017). Worthy of rights: Statelessness as a cause and symptom of marginalization. In Understanding Statelessness (pp. 17-34). Routledge. Page 17. 25 Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press. 26 Ibid. 27 See McGee, T. (2014). The Stateless Kurds of Syria: Ethnic Identity and National ID. Tilburg Law Review, 19(1-2), 171-181; and UNHCR, (2012) ‘Resolving Statelessness’ in The State of the World’s Refugees: In Search of Solidarity: A Synthesis’. 28 McGee, T. (2014). The Stateless Kurds of Syria: Ethnic Identity and National ID. Tilburg Law Review, 19(1-2), 171-181. 29 Ibid. 30 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2016). On the Threshold of Statelessness: Palestinian narratives of loss and erasure. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(2), 301-321. 31 Ibid. Pages 121 -122. 32 Ibid. Page 126. 33 Gibney, M. J. (2013). Should citizenship be conditional? The ethics of denationalization. The Journal of Politics, 75(3), 646-658. See Massey, H. (2010). UNHCR and de facto statelessness. 34 ‘Evaluation of UNHCR’s Role and Activities in Relation to Statelessness,’ UNHCR Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit (July 2001). 20 UNHCR / May, 2021 9