Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2016/06 [T]he moment that human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum human rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.4 She argued that in many cases, stateless persons could actually benefit from committing crimes, as they would in such cases at least have some standing before the law.5 The dependence of human rights protection on the system of nation-states has been characterised by Arendt as the “aporia”6 of human rights. Whilst the normative significance of human rights might be universal, their ascription is dependent on nation-states, and so those outside of this system are excluded. One might imagine that the proliferation of international law since Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism might have rendered her analysis out-of-date. In fact, however, in spite of the right to a nationality itself being inscribed as a human right in the Universal Declaration,7 and in spite of the institution of important legal instruments such as the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons8 and 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness,9 citizenship is ultimately determined by the state, and functions as “a practical prerequisite for accessing political and juridical processes and for obtaining economic, social and cultural rights”.10 Volker Türk, Director of International Protection at UNHCR, has described the situation thus: There is a fundamental contradiction in a world of nation-states in which millions of individuals are not recognised as belonging to any state.... Yet the scourge of statelessness persists, affecting the lives of individuals and communities the world over…. The fate of the stateless is harmful for the individuals concerned since they do not exist for the State, are invisible and deprived of the fundamental rights associated with nationality.11 Few countries have ratified the 1954 Convention, and the situation of stateless persons remains precarious.12 Those who are unable to produce proof of identity or nationality risk indefinite detention and unnecessary imprisonment, which is “one of the most pervasive and most difficult problems faced by stateless persons”,13 since without identity documentation, or a ‘home state’, states do not know to where stateless persons can be deported. Perks and Clifford point to the example of Ahmed Ali AlKateb, a stateless Palestinian man detained in Australia from 2000 to 2003.14 Kingston, Cohen and Morely point out that lack of nationality is often an obstacle in access to healthcare.15 We can see the enduring relevance of Arendt’s analysis in the fact that stateless persons are still routinely denied access to fundamental human rights, which are protected through the system of states. 2.2. Alienation from the Political Community For Arendt, the harm of statelessness does not only consist in the lack of practical recognition of one’s human rights. The stateless person is also faced with the denial of their status within the political and social community as a person worthy of partaking in public life. She writes: 4 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 292. Ibid., 286. 6 By ‘aporia’, Arendt means that whilst both the universality of rights and the nation-state system are individually plausible, they are in contradiction. The term is taken from the German text: Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, chap. 9. 7 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, sec. 15. 8 Hereinafter: 1954 Convention. 9 Hereinafter: 1961 Convention. 10 Weissbrodt and Collins, ‘The Human Rights of Stateless Persons’, 265. 11 UNHCR, ‘Remarks by Volker Türk, Director of International Protection’. 12 UNHCR, ‘Protecting the Rights of Stateless Persons’. 13 Weissbrodt and Collins, ‘The Human Rights of Stateless Persons’, 267. 14 Perks and Clifford, ‘The Legal Limbo of Detention’. 15 Kingston, Cohen, and Morley, ‘Debate’. 5 2