The United Nations launched a campaign Tuesday to end the hellish limbo of 10 million stateless people worldwide deprived of a nationality and basic rights, almost a fifth of them in Myanmar and Ivory Coast.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said a child is born stateless every 10 minutes, as it announced the global push backed in an open letter by the actress Angelina Jolie to end the scourge within a decade.
“Statelessness makes people feel like their very existence is a crime,” UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres told reporters in Geneva.
“We have a historic opportunity to end the scourge of statelessness within 10 years, and give back hope to millions of people. We cannot afford to fail this challenge.”
Myanmar considers its one million Rohingya Muslims illegal migrants from Bangladesh, which in turn considers the ones who cross the border illegal migrants from Myanmar.
The group, viewed by the UN as one of the world’s most persecuted peoples, faces widespread restrictions, including curbs on movement, education and marriage.
Ivory Coast has some 700,000 stateless people, the UNHCR told reporters at a regional launch of the campaign in the Senegalese capital Dakar.
Many are descendants of people forced from Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, by French colonialists in the 1930s to work on coffee and cocoa plantations.
Few took up a brief offer of citizenship, failing to register themselves or their children, and their descendants now have no documentation to prove their right to citizenship, yet they are also unrecognised in Burkina Faso.
– ‘Excluded from cradle to grave’ –
“We have no papers to prove our nationality, it has been so difficult for our family for all these years,” said a Burkinabe woman in Ivory Coast, quoted in a statement by the agency.
“It just felt as if we did not exist… Being stateless is like not having an identity.”
The UNHCR aims to highlight the “devastating life-long consequences of statelessness” and push countries to rectify their laws to ensure no person is denied a nationality.
“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 said in its report.
People can become stateless due to a range of reasons, like discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or gender, or when a nation state falls apart. War and conflict also often make it difficult to register births.
When countries break apart, people are often also left in limbo, with more than 600,000 people for instance still stateless after the disintegration of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago.
– ‘Statelessness is inhuman’ –
In situations of war, it also often becomes difficult to register births, especially among refugees, leaving them without a nationality.
Seven in ten babies born to Syrian refugees in neighbouring Lebanon and Jordan have for instance not received legal birth certificates, Guterres said.
Around 30,000 stateless people of Mauritanian origin live in exile in Mali and Senegal, stripped of their nationality in 1989 and 1990 following ethnic discriminatory policies that caused them to flee.
“Being stateless is like being a foreigner everywhere, a national nowhere. You don’t belong anywhere,” said Emmanuelle Mitte, the UNHCR’s senior protection officer on statelessness for west Africa.
A number of countries, including Iran and Qatar, also 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,” UNHCR warned.
Arguably history’s most famous stateless person, Albert Einstein remained without a home country from 1896, when he renounced his German citizenship, until 1901, when he became Swiss.
In an open letter, Guterres, UNHCR special envoy Angelina Jolie, UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi and Desmond Tutu and others described what living without a nationality can mean.
“Statelessness can mean a life without education, without medical care or legal employment,” the letter said, adding: “Statelessness is inhuman. We believe it is time to end this injustice.”