Statelessness, Trauma and Mental Well-being
instance, statelessness is linked to ethnic, gender or religious discrimination.
An example is biological female-identifying mothers’ inability to pass on
nationality to their children, i.e., citizenship laws based exclusively on
patrilineal descent. Gender discrimination can leave children stateless in
instances that their father is stateless, unknown, or unable to transmit his
nationality. Thus, citizenship deficits affect women and men differently
and it can also be experienced and claimed in gendered ways.19
iii) Technical causes refer to situations where statelessness is caused by gaps
in a country’s nationality laws and conflicts between different countries’
citizenship laws. Countries most often grant nationalities through either
blood relationship (jus sanguinis) or through birth in the country (jus
soli). When a child is born to nationals of a country that grants nationality
based on jus soli, a country that only confers nationality based on jus
sanguinis may not be able to acquire any nationality at birth. Other
‘technicalities’ include: denying nationality to abandoned children;
automatic loss of nationality of nationals residing out of their country
of origin without registering with their national embassy or consulate
in country of residence within a specific period; marriage practices of
certain countries where the foreigner loses their citizenship when they
marry a citizen of that country; and climate and environmentally induced
displacement. Furthermore, inability to prove nationality for nomadic or
internally displaced persons, undocumented migrants who face challenges
registering births of their children especially if born at home or based on
the unreasonable document and administrative processes.20 Although
lack of birth registration by minority populations does not equate to
statelessness, lack of documentation often leads to people being denied
access to citizenship and state services.
Statelessness can also affect whole communities because of deliberate exclusion of
these ethnicities. Nationality laws can be drawn up in a discriminatory manner,
whereby they deny minority populations access to nationality — such as the case of
the Rohingya in Myanmar, denationalisation of Jews by Germany, and retroactively
revoking nationality from persons of foreign descent, such as persons born in the
Dominican Republic since 1929. These stateless groups suffer from intergenerational
marginalisation and exclusion, which subsequently has consequences on the social
fabric of entire communities.21
It is crucial to note that a person may become stateless due to a combination of factors
mentioned above. A person may also very easily move from having citizenship to
losing it and vice versa. These are all factors that need to be taken into consideration
when developing a continuum of trauma-informed, trauma-transformed and
19
20
21
Roshni Chakraborty & Jacqueline Bhabha (2021) op cit note 3 237 at 239.
Ajwang’ Warria (2020) op cit note 15 6 at 12.
ISI (2014) op cit note 18 1 at 27.
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