Thus, although “reliance upon the accident of birth is inscribed in the laws of all modern states and applied everywhere” (Shachar 2009, 4) through jus soli and jus sanguinis citizenship transmission, states differ in how they qualify the acquisition of this status. For instance, some states, such as the Dominican Republic, grant citizenship via jus soli as long as one of the parents is a citizen or a legal resident, while other states do not have such a stipulation. In other cases, citizenship through jus sanguinis is limited in application through the first generation born overseas if the parents are no longer residents of their state of citizenship. Other states have different conditions depending on whether a child is born to a mother who is married or is born out of wedlock.
Female citizens are also at risk of denationalization in some states because of the prevailing marriage and divorce laws of their state of origin or state of residence. That is, some states stipulate that a woman will lose her birth citizenship and acquire the citizenship of her foreign husband upon marriage. If the marriage dissolves, the woman may be rendered stateless if the state of her former husband’s citizenship no longer recognizes her as a national or if her state of original citizenship does not reinstate the citizenship she held at birth. These and many other cases of conflicts, or protection gaps, in nationality laws force people into liminality, or statelessness.25
Even when laws are nondiscriminatory in principle, they may be arbitrarily applied in practice. As I demonstrate in Chapters 3 and 4, people may become stateless when civil servants, or those individuals authorized to act on behalf of the state regarding the provision or renewal of citizenship and identity documents, fail to provide such documents, intentionally or not. As Bronwen Manby, discussing the case of statelessness in Africa, explains, civil servants have been known to deny birth certificates on discriminatory grounds or to delay the granting of a passport to a legitimate, but “non-native” citizen.
In practice, individual Africans far more often face the practical impossibility of obtaining official documentation than an explicit denial of nationality. Yet something as simple as a failure to register a birth or an indefinite delay in obtaining a national identification card … can have consequences just as damaging and permanent as if denationalization had been enacted in the law. (2009, 115)
Such problems are not confined to Africa. In various places around the world, minority citizens face obstacles in obtaining or retaining their identity documents. As Chapter 4 explains, the Dominican Republic has generated much attention in recent years because civil registry officers have denied birth certificates, and consequently proof of citizenship, to children born of Haitians in the country who, according to the law prevalent at the time, should have been recognized as Dominican nationals (Wooding 2008, 370; Goris 2011).
While possession of a birth certificate or other forms of state-issued identity documentation does not necessarily mean that a person falls under the operation of a state’s law as a citizen,26 such documents are still the primary means by which a person who is struggling to establish or retain citizenship is able to make a claim to this formal status. This is one of the reasons why trafficked persons, as well as undocumented or irregular migrants, are susceptible to statelessness (van Waas 2008, 165–87). Children whose births go unregistered often find themselves in the same predicament.
Despite the fact that the majority of states around the world have signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child ([CRC] UN 1989), which explicitly asserts in Article 7 that “The child shall be registered immediately after birth,” the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that the births of approximately 290 million children are unregistered globally (UNICEF 2014a). Unable to prove to whom (citizenship acquisition via jus sanguinis) or where one was born (citizenship acquisition via jus soli) places a child at risk of not having their right to a nationality fulfilled—a clear violation of Article 7 of the CRC. The problem is of such magnitude that UNICEF considers birth registration one of its key child protection issues:
Apart from being the first legal acknowledgement of a child’s existence, birth registration is central to ensuring that children are counted and have access to basic services such as health, social security and education. Knowing the age of a child is central to protecting them from child labour, being arrested and treated as adults in the justice system, forcible conscription in armed forces, child marriage, trafficking and sexual exploitation.… In effect, birth registration is their “passport to protection.” (UNICEF 2014a n. pag.)
Lack of birth registration occurs for various reasons. Some states simply do not have the resources to establish civil registries in remote locations, while others have endured serious political or environmental events that destroy existing registries. In still other cases, parents fail to register the birth of their child in the appropriate institution or do not have the means to pay for the transportation or administrative costs to obtain a certificate. Most of the cases of unregistered births occur in South Asia and Eastern and Southern Africa where an estimated 61 and 62 percent of children under five years old are unregistered, respectively (UNICEF 2013, 43).27
Beside issues surrounding conflicts in nationality laws, inadequate application of existing nationality laws by state bureaucrats, outright discriminatory policies, and problems obtaining birth registration and documentation, statelessness can also result from state dissolution. Just as in the early twentieth century, when the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Tsarist polities disintegrated, the former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, USSR, and Sudan are all states that have either dissolved or have had a portion of their state secede and create a new state over the past few decades. In several of the European successor states, certain minority peoples were denied their right to a nationality and remain stateless today.
UNHCR, for example, has official figures on stateless people in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Republic of Moldova, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Ukraine. These populations range from as few as 206 known stateless persons in Armenia to 262,802 in Latvia (UNHCR 2015b). Controversies over citizenship have similarly come to the fore between Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan and consequently placed thousands at risk of statelessness (Reynolds 2012; Sanderson 2014).28
Human Rights Repercussions
As the previous section illustrates, statelessness may result for many different reasons and is not a condition that affects a particular age group or just one region of the world. A person can be born into statelessness or become stateless later in life, and statelessness is not a problem particular to authoritarian or transitioning regimes. Democracies also create and harbor stateless populations. Despite the wide range of people affected and the diverse ways of becoming stateless, stateless people are everywhere excludable because they belong nowhere. Without citizenship, a stateless person may have to deal with the refusal of identity documents and licenses,29 forced labor30 and enslavement,31 the denial of private sector employment,32 inadequate housing and healthcare,33 as well as the violation of other economic and social rights like social security and education.34 Stateless persons are also susceptible to family separation,35 torture,36 trafficking,37 and indefinite or unnecessary detention,38 while being denied adequate access to judicial procedures.39
Due to the obstacles that stateless people face in accessing various human rights, stateless populations often face higher degrees of chronic illness and unemployment, both of which can affect community development. For example, the poor conditions in which many stateless people live either generate or exacerbate health-related problems. The camps and settlements where stateless people live often lack adequate sanitation facilities and running
