international law, international conventions on statelessness, refugees and migrant workers nor
general human rights instruments provide effective protection for stateless persons on the move.
And the majority of the stateless remain on the move.
As a case in point, since its creation, UNHCR has strived to provide international protection regime
and sought durable solutions for statelessness .4 Specifically, UNHCR actively participated in
the drafting of the two global legal instruments concerning ending statelessness
the 1954
Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction
of Statelessness. Furthermore, in 1974 the UN General Assembly designated UNHCR as the
organisation to which persons claiming the benefit of the 1961 Convention may apply for
examination of their claims and for assistance in presenting those claims to state authorities (Manly
and Persaud 2009). And yet, UNHCR, or any other INGO with a clear international mandate
cannot produce solutions to problems created by states and normalized by societies chronically
producing stateless populations and benefitting from their ordeal. If we are to rewrite the script,
contra the dictum of durable solutions in international law, statelessness itself must be presented
as a manmade solution to nation-state maintenance and global capitalism s fervent need for subhuman forms of extraction rather than being a burden to be alleviated.
Coming back to the prototypical treatment of statelessness, particularly since 1989, questions
concerning the resolution of statelessness in Europe have once again gained traction. On the one
hand, exclusionary forces have become reinvigorated, as a result of which new forms of status
have been created, severel limiting participation and inclusion rights. On the other hand, Europe s
own minorities have been systemically targeted for exclusion, with Roma and ethnic Russians
being affected in particular. No doubt, there are developments in the areas of regional and
international lawmaking to counteract these developments represented by the case law of European
Court of Human Rights and Council of Europe law. However, none of these jurisdictional
interventions address the sources and caleidoscopic proliferation of statelessness in Europe and
As summari ed b Manl and Persaud, [i]n the end it is action by states that is required to
prevent and reduce statelessness. UNHCR cannot substitute for states. What UNHCR can do,
however, is document gaps in legislative and administrative frameworks and provide assistance to
address them. (2009, 7).
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