Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2016/06 The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion – formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities – but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them.16 Though some of Arendt’s critics have taken issue with the end of this quotation,17 it should be clear that ‘nobody wants even to oppress them’ is written in a tone “of bitter irony rather than contempt”.18 In We Refugees, Arendt writes that “passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction”.19 The alienation from the community faced by stateless persons is not only in their lack of access to civic rights such as the right to vote, it is a deeper exclusion from the public sphere. Stateless persons, pushed outside of the bounds of the political community, can be victimised and neglected, and they suffer in this way precisely because of their marginalisation from the community. More fundamentally, however, in the context of a world organised in terms of states, “the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity”.20 The marginalisation of stateless persons persists today in the communities in which they live. The Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion explicates their plight: Being slated as outsiders, not just by their country but by all countries, may indeed make the stateless easy targets for victimisation within society as they may be seen as less deserving of compassion, protection and support.21 A striking example of the marginalisation of stateless persons can be found in the plight of the Bidun in Kuwait, who have been systematically denied claims to nationality since the mid-1980s,22 and where cases of denationalisation seem to have been politically motivated.23 Stateless persons are not only unable to participate in public life because they lack of legal status within the community, but also because they often live in precarious situations which leave them unable to effectively participate. Batchelor points out that statelessness is “not merely a legal problem, it is a human problem”,24 and Tucker points out that stateless persons are often “undocumented, invisible, under researched and living on the margins of society”.25 In Myanmar, “systematic discrimination renders the Rohingya stateless, while their status as a stateless population acts as validation for further discrimination and persecution”.26 Statelessness today, as Arendt saw, is not only concerned with legal recognition of rights, but is bound up with the social contexts in which it exists, and such alienation from the community is an important aspect of the harm of statelessness that we ought not to fail to recognise. 3. ‘The Right to Have Rights’ For Arendt, the ‘right to have rights’ was posited as the solution to the problem of statelessness, and 16 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 295–96. See, for example, Rancière, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, 64. 18 Schaap, ‘Enacting the Right to Have Rights’, 13. 19 Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, 119. 20 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 297. 21 van Waas, de Chickera, and Albarazi, ‘The World’s Stateless’. 22 Bencomo, ‘Kuwait - Promises Betrayed: Denial of Rights of Bidun, Women, and Freedom of Expression’. 23 ‘Kuwait Urged to Stop Stripping Citizenship’. 24 Batchelor, ‘Statelessness and the Problem of Resolving Nationality Status’, 159. 25 Tucker, ‘The Humanitarian Side of Statelessness; Statelessness within the Framework of the Millennium Development Goals’, 12. 26 Zawacki, ‘Defining Myanmar’s “Rohingya Problem”’, 19. 17 3