SUB-REGIONAL OVERVIEW: THE PACIFIC questioned.212 Additionally, in June 2022 the High Court of Australia found some of the citizenship deprivation provisions to be unlawful.213 The status of those stripped of Australian citizenship prior to this decision remains uncertain.214 Childhood Statelessness The nationality laws of seven states (Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu) have no explicit protection for foundlings born on their territory. The citizenship laws of four states (Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and Tuvalu) provide citizenship to foundlings born on their territory. Foundling children in both Australia and New Zealand are automatically considered citizens.215 The laws of Tuvalu and Fiji provide the presumption that foundlings are considered to have been born in the country and in turn able to access citizenship through each state’s jus soli provisions.216 Three states (Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Papua New Guinea) provide limited protections for foundlings. The limited jus soli provisions in the laws of Kiribati and the Marshall Islands while structurally similar to those of Fiji and Tuvalu, do not explicitly provide that abandoned children are considered to be born in Kiribati or the Marshall Islands.217 As such, it is less clear how easily foundling children can access citizenship. The Constitution of Papua New Guinea provides foundlings automatic access to citizenship by descent by deeming them the be the child of a Papua New Guinean citizen.218 SUB-REGIONAL OVERVIEW: THE PACIFIC Administrative Barriers Administrative barriers to nationality appear to be less prevalent in the Pacific region compared to areas such as East Asia where household registration plays a vital evidentiary role for citizenship. This does not mean that administrative barriers are non-existent. For example, in Papua New Guinea children of refugee fathers and Papua New Guinean mothers continue to face both legal and administrative barriers to gaining birth certificates and citizenship.221 A nuisance and contextualized understandings of the practical applications of laws and policies across the Pacific is limited by our lack of country partners in the subregion. Birth Registration Birth registration rates across the Pacific are varied. Australia and Palau have both reported birth registration rates of 100%, while Papua New Guinea has reported the lowest rates of any state in the Asia Pacific at 13%, Vanuatu (43%) and Samoa (67%) have notably low rates of birth registration.222 While birth registration rates are extremely low in some countries, due to the FIGURE 10 Birth registration rates across the Pacific Australia Seven states (Australia, Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Zealand and Tuvalu) provide citizenship to children born on their territories who would otherwise be stateless.219 There is limited protection provided under the laws of Samoa (at Ministerial discretion) and Papua New Guinea to stateless persons born on the territory.220 There is no protection under the laws of the remaining six states (Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu). Palau lack of available data it is unclear due whether this correlates with an increase in stateless populations. Stakeholders in the Pacific Peter McMullin Statelessness Wilai Foundation: In 2014, one of the Wilai Foundation Ltd.'s founding members met a young girl in Thailand who was both orphaned and stateless. Seeking assistance for the girl through NGOs, they discovered that existing organizations all worked with villages, making finding help for an individual living under complicated and difficult circumstances impossible. As a result, the Wilai Foundation Ltd. was formed in 2016 as a registered Australian charity with the goal of providing support for young stateless and orphaned girls in Thailand and being the village for them. The foundation's members have traveled extensively throughout Thailand, visiting organizations that work towards ending statelessness, equipping them to educate others on the consequences and solutions of statelessness and raising awareness. The Wilai Foundation Ltd. directly funds the sustenance and education of girls who are stateless and orphaned, and regularly consults with authorities and lawyers to problem-solve and assist in obtaining citizenship for the girls. Additionally, the Asia Pacific Wilai Foundation Ltd. offers support to Bann Unrak (translates to “The Home of Joy”) in Sangkhlaburi, Thailand which provides housing, food, education, emotional support, and opportunities to vulnerable children on the ThaiMyanmar border. Vanuatu Centre on Melbourne Law School’s Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness was established in 2018 with the objective of undertaking research, teaching and engagement activities aimed at reducing statelessness and protecting the rights of stateless people in Australia, the Asia Pacific region, and as appropriate more broadly. The focus of the Centre is to develop teaching, research and engagement projects with three major aims: To properly understand the scope, scale and reasons for statelessness in order to develop targeted and effective responses to it; To work towards reducing and, over time, eliminating statelessness; and Until statelessness is eliminated, working to protect the human rights of stateless people within the countries in which they reside. Website: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/centres/ statelessness Samoa 13% 100% 100% 43% 67% UN Statistics Division, ‘Coverage of Birth and Death Registration’, (Feb 2021) 40 41 STATELESSNESS ENCYCLOPEDIA ASIA PACIFIC REPORT 2023