S P E C I A L R E P O RT / PA RT I C I PAT I O N “...a form of punishment more primitive than torture” A 1 0 -Y E A R C A M PA I G N T O E N D S TAT E L E S S N E S S © UNHCR / P. WU/JULY 2 014 Participation: Coming In from the Cold S S TAT E L E S S P E O P L E WA N T N OT H I N G M O R E T H A N TO C O M E I N F RO M “In the political life of the country, I do not have any voice.” – A STATELESS MAN IN THE BALTICS Stateless people almost never enjoy the right to vote or stand for public office. 16 the cold—to belong. But this is often impossible. They have few rights in either their social or professional lives and are often voiceless and politically impotent in communities where most have lived for many years. A woman in Brunei Darussalam expresses how helpless she felt: “Even if I do voice my opinion, I don’t think by my own voice it would matter.” And yet the ‘pull’ of the local community and state is strong even among these excluded people. A majority of stateless persons in Estonia said in a series of interviews that they viewed that country as home and wanted nothing more than to actively participate in the full political process. Exceptionally among stateless populations worldwide, stateless people in Estonia can vote in local elections but they still cannot stand as candidates, participate in national referenda or parliamentary elections or join a political party. As Railya in France eloquently articulates, there is nothing quite as hopeful, or in some cases as elusive, as feeling at home. “In Russian, there is a plant with no roots, perakati pole (tumbleweed). It tumbles. It rolls away with the breeze. That is statelessness. And me, I want to put down my roots.” NO VOICE The mood has changed in certain countries and in some situations stateless people are beginning to gain a tentative social foothold, often aided by stateless and local advocacy groups. In one case, filed by the Urdu-speaking Peoples Youth Rehabilitation Movement, the Bangladesh High Court in 2008 ruled that members of an Urdu-speaking minority which had been stateless since independence, were, in fact, nationals: “By keeping the question of citizenship unresolved on wrong assumptions over the decades, this nation has not gained anything—but rather was deprived of the contribution they could have made in nation building,” the court observed. A grassroots movement, Stateless Young Brazilians, Brasileirinhos Apatridas, rallied expatriates and their children to successfully push for a 2007 amendment to a constitutional provision which had required children born of Brazilian parents out- STAT E L E S S N E S S side the country to return home to live before they could be granted nationality. That requirement often resulted in children becoming stateless. It’s estimated that as many as 200,000 children were able to acquire Brazilian nationality as a result of the reform. Stateless groups in Mauritania and Kenya have used human rights mechanisms to lodge complaints at the international level. Elsewhere, groups employed petitions, public demonstrations and social media to demand a solution to their plight. J.S. is another example of a stateless person who desperately wants and needs his voice to be heard. He is of Malawian origin but was born and lived in Zimbabwe until he was 10 years old. He then traveled to South Africa with his mother before being abandoned by her. He attempted to obtain Zimbabwean documentation, even travelling back to Zimbabwe to pursue the necessary paperwork, but to no avail. He was unable to legally marry his companion, because he was undocumented and, he worries that his child might be stateless and voiceless also. “My dream is to have a document so that I can vote. I want the government to see me and to recognize my problem and to listen.” “Me, now I’m old, but now I’m looking to the dreams of my child. I want him to have a future.” Although there is already a community of UN, NGO and local actors working to resolve statelessness, a key component of UNHCR’s Campaign to End Statelessness is to foster greater partnership between the agency, governments, other international organisations, civil society and stateless groups to form a ‘global coalition’ and increase their collaboration to fight statelessness. STAT E L E S S N E S S Celebrations in the village of Dronguine, Côte d’Ivoire. The children of the village have received birth certificates which help to ensure that they are recognized as citizens of Côte d’Ivoire. S TAT E L E S S AC H I E V E R S MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH (1927-2007) Cellist, conductor and political activist Stateless from 1978 to 1990 17