SOLVING STATELESSNESS 4. Addressing statelessness through the rights to equality and non-discrimination Amal de Chickera and Joanna Whiteman1 1. Introduction “My neighbours speak badly to me because I am stateless. They tell me that I am not worthy of doing anything. They mean that I can’t study further, I can’t get my certificates, I can’t fight for common man posts, I can’t do anything to make something of myself and so why would they want to speak to me. They are my neighbours, my relatives.” Siwani, Nepal.2 Many statelessness stories, like that of Siwani, are tales of marginalisation and discrimination.3 Sometimes the centrality of discrimination to a person’s story is obvious. Siwani, for example, is stateless because her mother is Nepali but her father is not and Nepal is one of 27 countries that still have discriminatory nationality laws which do not allow women to confer their nationality on their children on the same basis as men. Sometimes the link between 1 2 3 Amal de Chickera is a co-founder and co-director of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) and Joanna Whiteman is co-director of the Equal Rights Trust (ERT). In conceptualising and producing this article, the authors have benefitted from the work they have done at ISI and ERT respectively. However, all views are the authors’ own. Siwani, the stateless daughter of a Nepalese woman, reflecting on her feeling that she faces discrimination from members of the community as well as authorities in Nepal during an interview with the Equal Rights Trust in Kathmandu on 14 October 2015. See, Equal Rights Trust, My Children’s Future: Ending Gender Discrimination in Nationality Laws, 2015, p. 23. For example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has stated that, “[d]iscrimination on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion, language or disability is a recurrent cause of statelessness. In fact, the majority of the world’s known stateless populations belong to minority groups. Instances of denial, loss and deprivation of nationality on discriminatory grounds leading to statelessness continue to occur in a range of countries. These include situations of mass deprivation of nationality on the grounds of ethnicity or race during recent decades.” UNHCR, Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014-2024, p. 14. 99