Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals H) Public health and stateless persons: the lessons of the COVID pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced awareness of a principle central to public health management: that “no one is safe until everyone is safe”.115 This principle should have ensured the inclusion of stateless persons within a public health response, but in practice it exacerbated existing structural discrimination that stateless people face in terms of access to health care, education and social assistance.116 The pandemic also made more visible the impact of such discrimination on those directly affected and the potential impact on the communities in which they live. In too many cases, stateless persons (as well as those without a recognized regular migration status) were excluded from COVID-19 relief and health-care measures; at the same time, the minority groups most affected by statelessness, such as the Roma and the Rohingya, were blamed for spreading the disease.117 By way of an example, a survey by R2P, a Ukrainian non-governmental organization, found that 46 per cent of stateless respondents had been refused access to a community doctor during the course of the pandemic because they lacked identification.118 Discrimination against stateless individuals and communities in which statelessness was prevalent discouraged or prevented them from accessing public health service providers and also contributed to vaccine hesitancy among some groups, even once vaccine programmes were opened to include people without citizenship or documentation.119 The pandemic thus exacerbated the existing impacts of statelessness,120 while public health risks were exacerbated by the exclusion of marginalized groups, including stateless populations. 3.5 Peace and security SDG16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels Individual security The importance of a recognized nationality for personal safety and security was recognized by the inclusion of the right to a nationality in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and encapsulated by Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation of citizenship as the “right to have rights”.121 Both were primarily responding to the denationalization of the Jewish population of Germany as the first step towards their attempted extermination. The expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar was similarly presaged by arbitrary deprivation of their citizenship of Myanmar.122 115. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Ursula von der Leyen, “A global pandemic requires a world effort to end it – none of us will be safe until everyone is safe”, World Health Organization, 30 September 2020 https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/a-global-pandemic-requiresa-world-effort-to-end-it-none-of-us-will-be-safe-until-everyone-is-safe. 116. Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, “Stateless in a global pandemic”, May 2020, www.institutesi.org/resources/briefing-note-statless-in-apandemic. 117. Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, “Together we did!” 118. Talha Burki, “Statelessness in the COVID-19 pandemic”, The Lancet 397, No. 10284 (April 2021): 1529–30, https://doi.org/10.1016/S01406736(21)00901-6. 119. Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, “Together we did!�� 120. Loganathan et al., “Education for non-citizen children in Malaysia during the COVID-19 pandemic”. 121. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, second ed. (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1958). 122. Chris Lewa, “North Arakan: an open prison for the Rohingya”, Forced Migration Review 32 (2009): 11–13; Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Unpacking the presumed statelessness of Rohingyas”, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 15, No. 3 (2017): 269–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1330981. 37