Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals • The community: communities that are home to many individuals who are not recognized as nationals of the country in which they live and have the strongest connections – or of any other country – may collectively face general exclusion from services and from participation in the formal economy. This exclusion can affect even those members of the community whose own nationality is recognized and documented. • The State: in the most serious situations of statelessness, the exclusion of large groups of people from recognition of nationality creates threats to the cohesion of society as a whole and may ultimately contribute to a breakdown of peace and security. Even in less extreme cases, the existence of large numbers of stateless people may reduce the perceived legitimacy of the government as well as impacting upon tax revenues and other forms of contribution that it receives. The next sections consider the impacts of statelessness on specific SDGs, particularly SDGs 1 and 8, on ending poverty and promoting inclusive and sustainable growth; SDGs 3 and 4, on health and education; and SDG 16, on peace and security. In each case, the paper analyses the impact of statelessness on individuals, communities and the State. The chapter finally highlights, as cross-cutting themes, the role of discrimination, the importance of the rule of law, and the linkages between statelessness and the recognition and documentation of legal identity. 3.3 Poverty SDG1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere SDG8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all Impoverished individuals Statelessness is a cause and a consequence of poverty.32 Although statelessness is in some circumstances created by conflicts of law that affect rich and poor alike – most notably if nationality laws discriminate on the grounds of sex in the transmission of nationality to children – far more often it is created by difficulties in proving entitlement to nationality in a form accepted by the competent authorities. Poor people are more likely to lack registration and certification documents for births, deaths, marriages, adoptions, legal residence and so on, or other legally accepted proof of the facts necessary for nationality to be recognized or acquired – whether based on family relationships, place of birth or residence. This lack of existing documents then makes registration of new life events more difficult, while poverty, the pressure of other needs and lack of legal assistance prevents those affected from regularizing their situation. In turn, lack of identity documents recognizing nationality frequently excludes people from working in the formal economy or establishing a business; from renting, owning or inheriting property; from accessing financial services, health care, or social protection measures such as food relief; from owning a mobile phone, now necessary for so many aspects of daily life; or from the ability to seek work in another part of the country or in another country.33 32. Lindsey N. Kingston, “Worthy of rights: statelessness as a cause and symptom of marginalisation”, in Understanding Statelessness, ed. Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017). 33. UNHCR, “This is our home: stateless minorities and their search for citizenship” (Geneva: UNHCR, 2017), 3, www.unhcr.org/ibelong/statelessminorities/; European Network on Statelessness, European Roma Rights Centre and Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, “Roma belong: statelessness, discrimination and marginalisation of Roma in the Western Balkans and Ukraine”, 2018, https://www.statelessness.eu/updates/ publication/roma-belong-statelessness-discrimination-and-marginalisation-roma-western; Jennifer Guay, “How being stateless makes you poor”, Foreign Policy, 30 June 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/30/how-being-stateless-makes-you-poor/. 23