2019
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
1(2)
segregation from other communities. Stateless persons are then rarely able to
benefit from legal recourse against discriminatory practices they face with
regards to housing and other rights violations, which creates a cycle where those
already most excluded from society face some of the greatest challenges in
finding the means for inclusion. 16 Furthermore, the lack of adequate housing can
create additional barriers to employment or the enjoyment of other rights, such as
the right to the highest attainable standard of health. This in turn furthers the
cycle of poverty and inequality already experienced by stateless persons, which
can lead to further exclusion. 17 Both the right to a nationality and the right to
adequate housing are referred to as preconditions for the enjoyment of other
rights, with the right to a nationality described as the ‘right to have rights’ 18 and
the right to adequate housing ‘considered as a prerequisite for the enjoyment of
civil and political rights’. 19 While it is noted that these terms can create a false
hierarchy of rights, they serve to underscore the importance of these rights and
their impact on the enjoyment of other human rights. Denial of citizenship,
barriers to adequate housing and poverty all create situations of further
discrimination, stigmatisation and marginalisation. In combination, these factors
increase the chances of intergenerational poverty, statelessness and further
exclusion. 20
Measuring the scope of violations of both the right to adequate housing and
the right to a nationality is inherently difficult. There is insufficient data on those
living in substandard housing, and especially for those experiencing
homelessness. Some state that ‘it is not possible at this stage to generate a
defensible estimate of the global extent of homelessness’. 21 And stateless
persons are ‘almost by definition, “uncounted”’. 22 States deny their existence or
ignore their presence, and fewer than half of all countries in the world have any
data on stateless populations. 23 The failure to sufficiently map the violation of
either right individually creates additional challenges in understanding the degree
to which the two categories overlap, and perhaps partially explains the lack of
existing research. But the absence of data should not be a deterrent for
attempting to understand the extent to which stateless persons face barriers in
enjoying the right to adequate housing; rather, it should provide impetus to
collect better data on both of these issues. This analysis will attempt to highlight
and better understand the intersection of the right to a nationality and the right to
adequate housing, and make those experiencing violations of both slightly less
invisible. This study will first explore the term adequate housing and identify
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, Statelessness, Human Rights and the Sustainable
Development
Agenda
(Working
Paper,
February
2017)
2
<http://www.institutesi.org/SDG_working-paper2017.pdf>.
Jennifer Guay, ‘How Being Stateless Makes You Poor’ Foreign Policy (30 June 2016)
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/30/how-being-stateless-makes-you-poor/>.
Hannah Arendt, ‘The Rights of Man: What Are They?’ (1949) 3(1) Modern Review 467.
Miltiadis Sarigiannidis and Ioanna Pervou, ‘Adequate Housing: Seeking Justiciability
through the Right to Property’ (2013) 1 International Journal of Human Rights and
Constitutional Studies 27, 30.
Amal de Chickera, All about Statelessness: What Development Actors Need to Know (Wolf
Legal Publishers 2017) 8.
Volker Busch-Geertsema, Dennis Culhane and Suzanne Fitzpatrick, ‘Developing a Global
Framework for Conceptualising and Measuring Homelessness’ (2016) 55 Habitat
International 124, 127.
Mark Manly and Santhosh Persaud, ‘UNHCR and Responses to Statelessness’ (2009) 32
Forced Migration Review 7, 7.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in
2017 (Annual Report, 2017) 51 (‘Global Trends’).
242