Earth is the birthplace of the entire humankind. Every man in the world has been born and raised in a state. Despite this truth, tragically a huge number of people in the world is stateless now. An individual doesn’t become stateless by birth but by some procedures. And sometimes statelessness transits from generation to generation.
Statelessness is the awful question of past and present history. This is the opposite term of ‘nationality’ or ‘citizenship’. Citizenship refers to the right to have rights. Statelessness defines the situation of possessing no legitimate or active citizenship. That means a stateless person has no right to get and enjoy rights and privileges from a state as a citizen.
There are many internationally established supportive tools to reduce statelessness. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights documented that every individual has a right to have the nationality with his or her birth. The Convention of the Rights of the Child has also given prominence to this. The Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Nationality of the Married Women emphasized states should protect women from losing their citizenship because of marriage or divorce or any other marital causes and working to terminate women’s marital statelessness. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specified ‘the right to have a nationality’ or ‘the right not to be stateless’ as a fundamental human right. The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness precisely centralizes on reducing statelessness and the several stateless people. While the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons determinedly functions to protect the world stateless population instead of decreasing statelessness.
Jus soli and jus sanguinis are the two types of citizenship laws worldwide. These two instruments have generated two kinds of statelessness; de jure and de facto statelessness. The jus soli law means the right of the soil. According to the law, an individual is considered a national of state following his place of birth. While the law of jus sanguinis refers to the type of citizenship is defined by blood or parental descent. If an individual is not evaluated as a nation under the two citizenship laws, he or she will be a de jure stateless. The persons holding inadequate citizenship or the sufferers of governmental repression are considered as de facto stateless persons.
Humans don’t born stateless. Rather there are many legal and political mechanisms to make an individual or a community stateless. There are also discriminated procedures that generate statelessness.
Mechanisms of Generating De Jure Statelessness
Firstly, the persons who are not considered as a citizen according to the citizenship laws of a country will be the de jure stateless persons. Secondly, the jus sanguinis laws of numerous countries grant citizenship following parental descent alone. A women’s getting married to a stateless man or having a child out of wedlock with a national are the major reasons for generating statelessness among newborns. The citizenship law defined by blood not only accelerates statelessness but also transmit statelessness from generation to generation. The children of the stateless parents have been becoming stateless and statelessness is turning into a social chronic disease. Thirdly, ‘dependent nationality’ is a global traditional tool to create and to stimulate statelessness. The term refers to the application of connecting the citizenship of a married woman to her husband’s nationality.
If a woman marries a foreign person, her nationality got automatically changed or she becomes stateless without having any citizenship. Even divorces and the death of the husband can make a wife stateless. The dependent nationality is also a global traditional tool to facilitate domestic and intimate partner violence globally. Fourthly, if a community or an individual disclaims their citizenship before obtaining another nationality, they will lose their national identity. In the fifth place, we can explain the fact that many governments countermand citizenship of their nationals if the particular citizens and their activities are found threatening to states and state authorities. Furthermore, sixthly, the transformation of the territory means succession or dissolution or breaking up of a state produces statelessness among the citizens of the old states. Seventhly, the reformation or deformation of the citizenship laws generates statelessness as particular communities got rendered stateless through the procedure.
Mechanisms of Generating De Facto Statelessness
The negligence of lawmakers and state discrimination are the reasons behind the generation of de facto statelessness. These stateless populations mainly are the victims of administrative oppression.
At first, slavery and human trafficking are also systematic procedures for how forced migrants and sex workers got stateless. In the case of the sex trade and human trafficking, the smugglers used to take the migrants’ official documents related to identity. In foreign countries, the migrants get no right to have rights, and documentarily they lose their former nationality. As a result, if anyhow they manage to acquire freedom but they become unable to return to their former country. Secondly, state governments often conduct systematic “erasure” or “administrative ethnic cleansing”. In this method, the documentary displays any particular nationals inactive or dead, citizens.
Statelessness is a tremendous dilemma for the world population. So we the world community have an immense responsibility towards the international stateless community.
