Country Position Paper: Statelessness in Myanmar creating an increasingly insecure situation for them. Since 2017 some Rohingya have been making their way back to the refugee camps of Bangladesh. 47 With no legal mechanisms in place to enable stateless Rohingya to regularise their status in the countries where they have sought refuge, many remain in situations of intergenerational insecurity and statelessness and face multiple forms of discrimination due to their immigration status. Left with no legal options, some Rohingya have resorted to obtaining travel documents through irregular means in order to move on to a safer country. Other minorities not included as one of the national ethnic groups of Myanmar Other groups, especially those who have affiliations with populations in the Indian sub-continent and China are also excluded from citizenship because their ethnic group is not recognised as one of the groups residing in Myanmar prior to the colonial period. 48 Some of these groups may not be generally referred to in Myanmar by self-ascribed ethnic identities due to the political nature of categorisation during the British colonial period and since the 1982 Citizenship law came into effect, fixing ethnic categories. Less is known about their experiences or strategies in negotiating the rigid ethnic criteria of the citizenship law as their groups are smaller and more dispersed. They may include Gurkhas, Tamils, Hindu speakers of Bengali-dialects, groups that straddle the Chinese/Myanmar border and Muslim and Hindu populations throughout the country who do not fall into an ethnic designation listed by the Myanmar state. 49 Myanmar’s treatment of stateless Rohingya children violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child Key resource: Goodwin-Gill and Pobjoy, commissioned by Save the Children, Norway, 2018: https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/node/13627/pdf/joint_legal_opinion_-_myanmar.pdf Other minorities in Rakhine State Other minority groups in Rakhine State, where populations are settled alongside or nearby Rohingya communities, have also been increasingly affected by statelessness. This includes Hindus and Maramargyi Buddhists who are linguistically affiliated and bare some physical resemblance to Rohingya. 50 Also affected are Kaman (or Kamein), who are a Muslim ethnic minority group residing in Rakhine State that are listed as one of the recognised national ethnic groups of Myanmar. Many Kaman are at risk of statelessness partly as a result of the destruction of their documents and displacement during the 2012 violence in Rakhine State, and also because their citizenship Human Rights Watch, 7 Rohingya Deported to India: Forced Return threaten life, liberty, violate international law, oct 2018 https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/10/04/india-7-rohingya-deported-myanmar 48 ARC, Myanmar: Query Response, The situation in Chin State and Sagaing Region, March 2019, section 13. Access to Documentation. See also, ARC, Myanmar Query Response – Chin State, July 2017, section 6 49 Charney, Michael, Misunderstandings of ethnic identities in Rakhine as fixed and biological are leading to policy errors by the Government of Myanmar and NGOs on the ground in Rakhine, SOAS, July 2018, https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/26123/1/Charney%202018%20Brief%20on%20Rohingya%20identity.pdf 50 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Submission to the UPR working group, 2015 (IDMC 2015). https://uprdoc.ohchr.org/uprweb/downloadfile.aspx?filename=2112&file=EnglishTranslation 47 12