UNHCR takes on statelessness

On Tuesday, the United Nations pledged to eradicate statelessness within a decade under the name "I Belong." The UN refugee agency launched a similar campaign in 2011.

The campaign has enlisted the actress Angelina Jolie, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu, the author Khaled Hosseini and other notables to sign an open lettter calling for "10 million signatures to change 10 million lives."

"Every 10 minutes a new stateless person is born," UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres said Tuesday. "Statelessness makes people feel like their very existence is a crime," Guterres added.

People can become stateless for a range of reasons, including discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or gender, the disintegration of nations, and conflict. More than 600,000 people have remained stateless since the Soviet Union broke apart in the 1990s. Continuing conflicts have also made births difficult to register, especially among refugees.

"Often they are excluded from cradle to grave, being denied a legal identity when they are born, access to education, health care, marriage and job opportunities during their lifetime and even the dignity of an official burial and a death certificate when they die," the agency reported.

According to officials, the UNHCR has already made some progress toward resolving the issue, with more than 4 million stateless people gaining a nationality in the past decade, thanks to legislative and policy changes.

'Chains of statelessness'

The report does not count Palestinians as stateless because the UN General Assembly has recognized Palestine, Guterres said. He said that the state of Palestine has yet to approve its own nationality laws for the 4.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and the millions more living as refugees around the world. He went on to insist that this "very specific situation" required a "political solution."

Seventy percent of the 50,000 babies born to Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere have not yet received legal birth certificates, Guterres said. Children represent over a third of the world's stateless population. A number of countries, including Iran and Qatar, deny women the right to pass their nationality on to their children on an equal basis with men - "a situation that can create chains of statelessness that span generations," the UNHCR warned.

Myanmar has become the "home" to the largest stateless population, with about 1 million Rohingya Muslims denied citizenship, according to Guterres. The country considers them illegal migrants from Bangladesh, which deems the ones who cross the border as illegal migrants from Myanmar. In both countries, the group, classified by the United Nations as one of the world's most persecuted peoples, faces widespread restrictions, including curbs on movement, education and marriage.

The Ivory Coast, Thailand, Nepal, Latvia and the Dominican Republic also have large stateless populations.

mkg/ksb (Reuters, AFP)