OVERVIEW Skopje ke n ya Kwale County T H E F o r m er yu go Mahajanga sl av rep ubli c of macedonia In May and June 2017, UNHCR spoke with more than 120 individuals who belong to stateless, formerly stateless or at-risk minority groups in three countries: the Karana of Madagascar, Roma and other ethnic minorities in The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and the Pemba and the Makonde of Kenya. The consultations enabled UNHCR to better understand the key causes of statelessness of these groups, as well as the impacts of being stateless on their lives. While there is no reliable data concerning the exact figure of stateless persons globally, UNHCR estimates that there are currently millions of people without any nationality. Many of these people belong to a group that is an ethnic, religious, or linguistic minority in the country in which they have often lived for generations. They are therefore distinct from the majority both because they are stateless and because they are minorities.(3) This report considers both statelessness status and minority status as they relate to each other through people’s lived experiences. In some cases a person’s statelessness is caused by explicit exclusion from citizenship in the nationality law of the country in which they live on the basis of their minority status. For example, the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, the largest known stateless group in the world, are excluded from a list of ‘national ethnic groups’, which, according to the 1982 Citizenship Law, automatically acquire citizenship at birth. They are unable to acquire Myanmarese nationality because of the discriminatory way in which the law is drafted and applied in practice. In Syria, in 1962, a special census ordered by decree negatively impacted 300,000 Syrian Kurds leaving them stateless (this number has since been reduced to 160,000).(4) In other situations, the discrimination is less explicitly linked to minority status. For example, a 6 • UNHCR STATELESSNESS REPORT 2017 k e n ya (3) While there is no internationally agreed definition of a minority, it is commonly accepted that a minority is an ethnic, religious or linguistic group, fewer in number than the rest of the population, whose members share a common identity. See, e.g., Article 27, international Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. (4) Important steps have been taken to address the situation of Syrian Kurds deprived of their nationality in 1962; most notably, in 2011 Decree 49 was promulgated, leading to the granting of Syrian nationality to thousands of stateless persons from the ethnic Kurdish minority since then. mada gascar 2013 Constitutional Court ruling in the Dominican Republic had a disproportionate impact on persons of Haitian descent born in the country, depriving many persons from this minority group of nationality, even if the ruling did not expressly target them. Discrimination in administrative practices in a number of countries can leave minority groups without documentation such as birth certificates and national I.D.s. Such documentation is vital to proving their entitlement to nationality, leaving them at risk of statelessness or stateless where the discrimination is systematic and persistent. Where minority groups are poorer, less well educated, unable to speak the national language, live in remote areas or do not have access to avenues for advice or support, their ability to counter this discrimination, and the resulting exclusion it causes, remains extremely limited. 2017 UNHCR STATELESSNESS REPORT • 7