“What are the implications for national and international security of allowing terror suspects to be loose and undocumented in whatever country they happen to be in when their citizenship is revoked?…There are many unanswered questions” Baroness Smith of Basildon, Parliamentary debate in the UK House of Lords, 17 March 2014 Citizenship-stripping of ISIS and former ISIS fighters stops them from …
It has been six months since the Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC) of 1951 received its final update. I have written about the continued impact of updating Assam’s Register in previous blogs here and here. Around 2 million people are excluded after the final count. More and more is written about this crisis in the making, the impact it …
I have written before about discriminatory nationality laws, specifically in relation to Nepal. But Nepal is not the only country with this problem. There are 25 countries in the world which still have discriminatory nationality laws. Among them are Brunei, Kuwait, eSwatini, Liberia, the Bahamas, Barbados and Iran. Iran has recently been in the news for proposals which are set …
In an earlier blog I considered some of the countries which had not yet acceded to the two Statelessness Conventions and which had no formal protective framework to avoid, reduce or mitigate the effects of statelessness. People are stateless or become stateless for many different reasons. What they have in common, wherever they are in the world, is the effect …
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency describes the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness as “The key international conventions addressing statelessness. They are complemented by international human rights treaties and provisions relevant to the right to a nationality”. But still there are many states that are non-parties and have …
In this blog I consider the causes of statelessness in Lebanon. The situation in Lebanon is complex, for historic reasons, due to discriminatory nationality laws, administrative challenges and its large long-term refugee population, primarily from Syria and Palestine. There is enough material to fill a whole book, never mind just the one post. In this blog I focus on statelessness …
In this blog I consider the stateless population in Sabah state, part of Malaysia, how and why they are in this precarious position and what, if anything, Malaysia is doing to reduce the number of stateless people in Sabah. Who are the Sabah stateless? Sabah is a state in Malaysia and part of the island of Borneo. Sabah became …
“You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious …
An estimated 5.4 million individuals in Nepal (24 per cent of the population aged 16 years and above of Nepal’s 30 million population) do not have citizenship documentation. I wrote about all the basic rights that are unavailable to a stateless person here. Statelessness in a population arises for a number of reasons such as minority group discrimination, migration issues, …
In my last blog, I looked at statelessness determination procedures as a tool to help eradicate statelessness and mitigate the effects of statelessness for stateless people. In this blog, I want to come back to this issue. I look more closely at how the procedure can help both stateless people and the state, which countries have made use of the …
