SOLVING STATELESSNESS
(IDPs) that a country produces to rank States on the development
indicator of “human security”.19
De Chickera has also pointed to the preoccupation of international
development programmes with “national and nationalistic outcomes:
‘Kenyan development for Kenyans’ or ‘Sri Lankan development for Sri
Lankans’”.20 Stateless people, who are frequently excluded even from
national population censuses,21 are not factored into the equation
when development needs are being assessed and are therefore
unlikely to benefit from development outcomes. A fourth charge made
by de Chickera is that “development is more concerned with aggregate
improvements and less so with equality of access and enjoyment of
the improvements made”.22 Although it appears that efforts are being
made by development actors to find ways to measure inequality and
marginalisation,23 including through the SDGs, as outlined below,
stateless persons frequently exist at the very peripheries of society,
making them among the easiest to exclude and their exclusion the
least likely to be noticed. De Chickera has asserted, that the problem
is that “development promotes aspiration, not obligation”24 and that
aspirations will not be realised if not coupled with obligations to
treat people equally, to be fair and not to discriminate – in short, good
governance and a rule-of-law approach are needed for development
to be meaningful for stateless persons and to avoid entrenching their
position of inequality. Finally, development has traditionally been
seen as something for the ‘developing world’, notwithstanding the
fact that thousands of stateless persons live impoverished lives in the
‘developed world’ and therefore miss out on the fruits of development
initiatives. The 2030 Agenda seeks to remedy this by seeking to ensure
that “[g]oals and targets [are] met for all nations and peoples and for
all segments of society”.25
Notwithstanding these and other barriers to statelessness being seen
and addressed as a development issue, surveys and studies26 of stateless
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
See, UNDP, supra n17, Statistical Annex, Table 14 – Human Security.
See, de Chickera, supra n15.
UNHCR, Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014 – 2024, p. 24.
See, de Chickera, supra n15.
UNDP, supra n17.
See, de Chickera, supra n15.
See, UNGA, supra n4.
For example, see, Georgetown University Human Rights Institute Fact-
51