SOME lucky babies are entitled to a clutch of passports: one born in America to a Lebanese father and Japanese mother, for example, can have three. Other unfortunates—one born in Norway to a Lebanese mother and unknown father, say—are entitled to none at all. Unless some country takes pity on them, they will join the world’s 10m or so stateless people in legal limbo, acknowledged as citizens nowhere. Many are unable to work legally, travel across borders or use public services. Almost none can vote or stand for election.
Some of the biggest groups of stateless people are in countries with poor statistics; those who can be counted number 3.5m (see chart). Many lack a nationality because their homelands splintered and they fell in the cracks between successor states’ citizenship rules. Estonia and Latvia, for example, require descendants of Russians who arrived during the Soviet period to pass a language test before becoming citizens, thus excluding monoglot Russians. Russia, too, has many stateless people, many of them forced migrants, or their descendants, who ended up in the wrong place when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Governments sometimes make residents stateless, even when no borders have been redrawn. Myanmar grants citizenship to 135 ethnic groups—but not the Rohingya, who are Muslims with a distinctive language in a mainly Buddhist country. Around 800,000 stateless Rohingya live within its borders and almost as many elsewhere, having fled persecution.
Most rich democracies grant citizenship to children born on their territory who would otherwise be stateless (Norway is an exception). And a recent push by the UN to get more countries to sign two treaties granting basic rights to stateless residents, and seeking to resolve their legal status, has started to bear fruit. Last year Ivory Coast, where disputes about nationality have fuelled civil conflict, became the 20th country to ratify at least one of the treaties since 2011. It is now taking steps to resolve the citizenship of several hundred thousand stateless residents.
But even as some countries are cutting statelessness, in others it is on the rise. Last year a court in the Dominican Republic ruled that citizens of Haitian descent born since the country’s constitution was written in 1929 should have their citizenship status reviewed and “corrected”, making more than 200,000 people stateless and excluding them from schools, health care and formal jobs. More recently, Britain’s government is seeking to give the home secretary the power to strip citizenship from naturalised Britons suspected of acting against the national interest, even if they would thereby become stateless (at the moment, that is banned).
Only a few, arguably unsavoury, people will be affected by the British plans (the aim is to stop Britons fighting in Syria from returning). But they still break a long-standing taboo. Making people stateless is a favoured weapon of dictators, said Lord Pannick, voting against the plans in the House of Lords earlier this month. “We should do nothing to suggest that it is acceptable.”
This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "Nowhere to call home"
