Stateless people
This piece in the International Herald Tribune provides a glimpse into the insecure shadowland which is inhabited by millions of people in many parts of the globe who due to accidents of circumstance and history find themselves effectively stateless.
Hidden in the back corners of the world is a scattered population of millions of nobodies, citizens of nowhere, forgotten or neglected by governments, ignored by census takers.
Many of these stateless people are among the world’s poorest; all are the most disenfranchised. Without citizenship, they often have no right to schooling, health care or property ownership. Nor may they vote, or travel outside their countries – even, in some cases, the towns – where they live.
They are stateless for many reasons – migration, refugee flight, racial or ethnic exclusion, the quirks of history – but taken together, these noncitizens, according to one report, “are among the most vulnerable segments of humanity.”
Whilst it is true that, at least from an Australian perspective, the vast majority of this group of uncertain size are “hidden in the back corners of the world”, a small number of them are in Australia at any one time, and the treatment they have received has sometimes been less than laudible.
The main reason the article first caught my attention was that it mentioned the Rohingya people. I had never heard of this ethnic minority, who hail originally from Burma, until a group of 8 Rohingya refugees sought protection in Australia . The previous Australian govenrment responded by taking them to Nauru, where they languished for over a year. Thankfully, they are now in Australia on Protection Visa, once again showing that the public expense and human suffering deliberately incurred by isolating refugees on Nauru served no purpose other than a domestic political one.
As the article mentions, the treatment meted out to the Rohingya people by the Burmese regime has seen them “stripped of citizenship and denied civil rights and face exploitation, forced labor and religious persecution. More than 100,000 Rohingya have fled in recent decades to Bangladesh, where they live in camps or on the streets.”
The article also mentions the Bihari, who are from what is now Bangladesh. As a consequence of the creation of the Bangladeshi state out of a part of Pakistan in 1971, those who stayed in their homelands are now stateless. I met with a Bihari person a couple of times on some of my visits to the detention centres on Nauru. He was kept locked up there by the previous Australian government kept locked on Nauru for over four years, until he finally was recognised as a refugee and received a Protection Visa.
Statelessness was also a key feature of the infamous Al-Kateb case, where our High Court ruled that it is lawful for our government keep a non-citizen convicted of no crime – in this case a stateless Palestinian man - in detention forever, even if there was no other country they could be removed to (as can tend to be the case with a stateless person).
Sometimes it is convenient for countries to keep (or put) people in a situation of statelessness. As the article notes, some developing (and obviously less than perfect) democracies, particularly in Africa, are using the granting or removal of citizenship as a political weapon. It can be a way to disenfranchise opponents (something developed democracies sometimes also do, although usually in more subtle ways), remove other legal rights (or make them much harder to enforce, which is much the same thing) and to generally make people less secure and thus more easily exploitable and expendable.
Statelessness is a subset of the refugee issue. In some respects it is one of the most difficult to address, although one could also say that with a decent dose of compassion and realism, instead of political opportunism and short-term miserliness, it would at least in some circumstances be much easier to solve.
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
battery
Family legends say that some of my ancestors were made stateless as a result of shifting borders in Central Europe in the 19th Century. This was compounded by their being Jewish, I believe. They came to Australia by some dodgy means, and changed their family name, it is said, in an effort to ‘blend in’. I often think of the effect of those stories on later generations, all of whom in that line stayed stubbornly inside Australia. To this day we are not travellers, though other branches of my family are. Was the harsh fact that you can be swept up in larger events and unable to gain the protection of any powerful entity such a stern lesson that it echoes now, nearly 200 years later? I know that I don’t really understand the whole of it, but this small glimpse of what might happen to people like the Biharis or other minorities or plumb unlucky people as a result of war, or famine, or economic circumstances should form part of our deliberations in this conclave to be held in Canberra. What IS our moral duty to others? What ought we do do in all conscience for those who have no home? “A lot more than we presently do,” is my answer.
Mar 2nd, 2008
zen
Before the WWII there was a thing called “Nansen’s Card”. I do not know exactly where it came from but my grandfather, who was stateless at the time, was studying at the Lvov (now Ukraine) Technical University. The Nansen’s Card was a temporary relief for stateless people giving them temporary residence status.
Wars, revolutions and ‘conquering new lands and creating new states’ always create a big army of people who ‘do not belong’.
When the Soviet Union colapsed, many people from Lithania, Latvia, Georgia, etc, got caught up in the ‘New Order’.
I think, that many people in Kosovo have been caught now; no passports, no right to leave the country to visit close relatives ‘across the river’, no authority to issue visas or passports.
We keep generating stateless people. It amounts to persecution and it is a form of torture.
Mar 4th, 2008
PeterC
Nansen’s Card (more usually called a ‘Nansen Passport’) was an internationally recognized identity card designed in 1922 by the famour Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and first issued by the League of Nations to stateless refugees. It was mainly introduced as a response to the dislocation of people following the Russian Revolution and consequent civil war.
Mar 4th, 2008
zen
PeterC
Many thanks, Peter.
That ‘Nansen’s Card’, as we called it, was a sort of a somehow ’sacred document’ in our family as it had allowed the grandpa to complete two faculties (electrical and mechanical engineering) at the Lvov Polytechnics before he obtained American citizenship…by birth.
The late grandpa has two of his great grandchildren born in Australia – Australian born citizens.
Well, with, or without a visa label, we are all NOMADS.
Mar 5th, 2008