Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals There are obvious opportunities to make these checks. Many development projects start with an impact assessment that considers questions such as social and environmental risks, or the protection and fulfilment of human rights. The human rights approach adopted by the UN agencies emphasizes universality of entitlement to all human rights, interdependence of different rights, equality and non-discrimination, participation in development processes, accountability and the rule of law.182 All of these principles are of critical importance to stateless persons, who are often excluded from supposedly universal rights, confronted by systematic discrimination, unable to participate in decisions affecting their future and prevented from accessing the courts or other mechanisms of redress. Questions about the situation of stateless persons and those whose nationality is undocumented should be integrated into impact assessments templates, especially where statelessness is already known to affect a substantial number of people in the country concerned. Often the exclusion of stateless individuals and groups, and the causes of their statelessness, is already well-documented – but perhaps not in the development literature.183 Relevant information sources and actors should be consulted to consider whether statelessness is an important issue in the country in question and what the concerns may be. Annex 1 provides a list of resources on nationality and statelessness, at both global and country level. Development initiatives should be assessed against a checklist of known vulnerabilities of stateless individuals and groups in that society – vulnerabilities that are different from or additional to the general vulnerabilities of the poorest communities.184 This means not only asking the question of whether there are stateless people living in the country in question and whether they are excluded, but also considering how and why statelessness affects their situation.185 Initiatives to strengthen identification systems raise particular concerns, given the centrality of identification systems for the recognition of nationality and the creation of statelessness. Impact assessments for these initiatives should have a heightened focus on statelessness (see heading below on Legal identity, page 59). 4.2 Identification and inclusion: recognizing the importance of statelessness Inclusion of stateless persons Programming to improve access to public services and livelihoods or the protection and empowerment of vulnerable groups should consider the specific vulnerabilities of stateless persons. These fall into two main categories: • Vulnerabilities related to a lack of identity documents, including birth certificates and, in particular, whichever specific identity document is required to access any particular service or other programming; • Vulnerabilities related to the official perception of the individual or group as non-nationals of the country of residence – without confirmation of the nationality of any other country – whether or not this is accompanied by an identity document recording status as a non-national. Where development programming (or humanitarian relief) is accompanied by identification procedures specific to that system (health clinic cards, for example), statelessness and a lack of national identity documents are less likely to be of significance for the target population. However, where access to public 182. UN Development Group, “The human rights based approach to development cooperation: towards a common understanding among UN agencies”; see also Eitan Felner and Siobhan McInerney-Lankford, “Human rights impact assessments: a review of the literature, differences with other forms of assessments and relevance for development” (Washington, D.C.: World Bank and Nordic Trust Fund, 2013), http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/834611524474505865/Human-rights-impact-assessments-a-review-of-the-literature-differences-with-other-forms-of-assessments-and-relevancefor-development. 183. In general, there are very few references to statelessness in development project documents of, for example, the World Bank, the United Nations or the European Commission. Those references that do exist are often to include stateless persons in a list of potentially vulnerable groups, rather than to consider their specific vulnerabilities or the reasons for their statelessness. 184. One example of such a checklist which makes reference to stateless communities, but could be elaborated to do so in more detail, is: “Marginalised minorities in development programming: a resource guide and toolkit”, UNDP, 2015 www.undp.org/publications/marginalised-minoritiesdevelopment-programming-resource-guide-and-toolkit. 185. Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, “Statelessness, human rights and the sustainable development agenda”. 48