Legal Identity and Minority Statelessness Cambodian authorities. A ministerial official summarised the widely held view: ‘We don’t remove their citizenship, they are Vietnamese. We just take the Cambodian documents.’ 29 Confiscated documents are kept with the Ministry of Interior, and it is uncertain whether the authorities intend to return them. These policies seem to have treated all Vietnamese residents the same, regardless of whether they have resided in Cambodia for generations or are more recent immigrants. The census and registration did not provide an individual assessment that would have considered the specific circumstances and legal status of each individual. The underlying assumption seems to be that people of Vietnamese origin or with Vietnamese names are ‘immigrants’, irrespective of any legal entitlements they may hold under Cambodian law. Numerous Vietnamese long-term residents and/or their children may in fact be entitled to Cambodian nationality under past and current nationality laws, but struggle to provide or obtain documentary proof. 30 The confiscation of legal documentation will make such proof more difficult to provide, and in effect eradicate the limited documentary proof of residence or previous migration held by affected populations. A NUMBERS GAME A lack of data about the size of the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia and the scope of the legal identity problem has been a key impediment to greater domestic and international recognition of the challenges faced by this population. Due to the sensitivity of the topic and the politicisation of population figures, the Cambodian Government long refrained from publishing statistics about Vietnamese populations on its territory. The most recent population census, conducted in 2019, listed 78,090 individuals whose ‘mother tongue’ is Vietnamese. 31 MIRO estimates the total number as being somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000, 32 while the political opposition has frequently made much higher but unsubstantiated claims. 33 The Ministry of Interior’s ‘foreigner’ census identified 180,000 Vietnamese ‘nationals’ residing in Cambodia, of which almost 29 30 31 32 33 Kong Meta, ‘Interior Ministry Identifies 70,000 “Improper” Citizens, Mostly Ethnic Vietnamese’, Phnom Penh Post (online, 5 October 2017) <https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/interior-ministry-identifies-70000-impropercitizens-mostly-ethnic-vietnamese>. The 2018 Law on Nationality provides under art 9(2) that ‘any child who is born from a foreign mother and father (parents) who were born and living legally in the Kingdom of Cambodia’ shall obtain ‘Khmer’ nationality: Law on Nationality (n 30) art 9(2). See also Christoph Sperfeldt, Report on Citizenship Law: Cambodia (Country Report No RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2017/2, Global Citizenship Observatory, January 2017) 12. Figures exclude migrants working abroad: National Institute of Statistics Cambodia, General Population Census of the Kingdom of Cambodia 2019: National Report on Final Census Results (Report, October 2020) 25. ‘Cambodia: Ethnic Vietnamese’, Minority Rights Group International (Web Page, November 2017) <http://minorityrights.org/minorities/ethnic-vietnamese/>. Kok-Thay Eng ‘Both the CPP and CNRP Need to Rethink Some of Their Policies’ (2014) 3 The Cambodia Law and Policy Journal <http://cambodialpj.org/both-the-cpp-and-cnrp-needto-rethink-some-of-their-policies/>; See generally Kevin Ponniah, ‘Cambodia’s Vietnamese Community Finds Voting is Not Necessarily a Right’, The Guardian (online, 4 September 2013) <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/povertymatters/2013/sep/04/cambodia-elections-vietnamese-voting>; Paul Millar ‘Race to the Bottom’, Globe (online, 21 October 2016) <https://southeastasiaglobe.com/cambodiaopposition-cnrp-vietnamese/>. 351