AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 6 No 2, MAY-AUG 2020
and must live in the shadows on the outermost margins of society.” This supports
earlier assertions by Ball et al. (2014) that estimates of stateless persons vary because
of heterogeneity, the situations that led to them being stateless and challenges involved in calculating people who are legally excluded. This paucity of information
has been attributed to the lack of serious attention it has been accorded. In addition,
stateless people are “often undocumented���ignored by authorities and not counted
in national administrative registries and databases or in population censuses” (Foster
and Lambert, 2016: 568). A further challenge in collecting information on stateless
people is their unwillingness to be identified because of their immigration status and
their unconscious vulnerability.
OVERVIEW OF GENERAL PATHWAYS TO STATELESSNESS
According to Ball et al. (2014), there are different pathways to statelessness, and
therefore varied approaches and interventions are required to address the issue. The
following are some wide-ranging pathways to statelessness: (i) political change; (ii)
expulsion from territory; (iii) discrimination; (iv) descent-based nationality; (v)
withdrawal of nationality; and (vi) laws on birth registration. These pathways may
vary from country to country.
Being undocumented can act “as a possible protection against state surveillance, control and persecution” (Ball et al., 2014: 6). This can be so especially in areas
or countries where there have been incidents of discrimination and massacres based
on ethnic and/or religious affiliations. In addition, lack of documentation may benefit working children, who due to family circumstances are able to work and contribute to family resources and income because their status cannot be confirmed, and
their age cannot be proven by labor inspectors. On the other hand, this also opens up
the prospects of exploitation and trafficking (Warria, 2017b).
There are also different pathways to child statelessness. Some include: (i) inability to register a child’s birth even though they might be entitled to citizenship; (ii)
when children are born in one country and they travel with their parents to live in
another country without documentation; (iii) unaccompanied or separated children
in country of resettlement without documentation; (iv) trafficked children; (v) fondlings, i.e. abandoned children whose parents cannot be identified; (vi) unregistered
children or children without birth records who are left under the care of relatives;
and (vii) children born in countries where discriminatory provisions exist in nationality laws based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. Whichever way one looks at
it, “understanding determinants and consequences of birth registration is critical to
gaining insight into how migration can affect child protection” and their rights (Ball
et al., 2017: 310). However, it should be noted that not all unregistered children at
birth become stateless. Lack of registration merely increases their risk of being unable to claim nationality at a later stage.
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