Often times when we post about immigrant rights on SM I see a conflict develop between those that believe that even certain basic rights should only be granted to, or expected by citizens, and those who believe this policy is too harsh. As one commenter pointed out, the U.S. Constitution does not consider immigration status when dealing with certain freedoms. The reason I bring this up is that governments around the world have been using the “citizenship loophole” to deny large populations of people the right to have rights. The Christian Science Monitor explains by citing the example of Geneva Camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh:
Borders have made all the difference in the life of 25-year-old Noor Islam. He was born in Bangladesh, but an invisible line has virtually confined him to Geneva Camp, a squalid enclave in the capital, Dhaka.
Shifting borders dictated this fate. In 1971, when East Pakistan gained independence as Bangladesh, Islam’s family and some 300,000 other Urdu-speakers found themselves without a nationality in the new Bengali state.“In Geneva Camp, we don’t have much access to education and jobs,” Islam says, adding that citizenship would dramatically transform their lives.
The so-called Stranded Pakistanis are one of the largest and oldest communities of stateless people, a group estimated to number 11 million across the globe. Their predicament deserves more attention, say experts, since national identity is the most fundamental of human rights – indeed, the very right to have rights.
“They are the ultimate forgotten people,” says James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York. The problem persists, he says, in part because nation-states still enjoy broad discretion under international law to grant or deny citizenship as they see fit.
It’s really easy to exploit citizenship status actually. Even our own President uses it to a degree. If you change a person’s status from citizen to something else, say an “enemy combatant,” they no longer have the right to have rights. They become a stateless person. Governments all around the world are getting in on the action to make their “problems” go away (and have been for decades).
Statelessness is the untold dark side of new nations, including those in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. To date, nearly 20 percent of the population in Latvia and Estonia are stateless persons, according to one estimate. Thousands of stateless people languish in poor conditions in some of the most politicized and conflict-ridden areas of the world, including Palestine and Iraq.The reasons for the problem differ from region to region, at times caused by the sweeping succession of states as in the former Soviet Union. The chaos of war often prevents birth registration, a subtle but destructive denial of rights for newborns. In many Middle Eastern states, laws confer citizenship based on patrilineal descent, meaning that those born to women or male non-citizens are denied citizenship of their country of birth.
Despite divergent causes, statelessness exacts a common and extraordinary toll on its victims, depriving them of the basic rights that most citizens take for granted.
…These are powerful lessons to bear in mind in light of nation-building efforts around the world, particularly Iraq. “For Iraq, it’s very clear that Saddam Hussein deprived many people of their nationality – particularly the Kurds,” says Philippe Leclerc, UNHCR’s senior legal officer for statelessness. “What we would like to see in the negotiations on the constitution is to ensure … that it is not possible to deprive a person of his or her nationality on grounds linked to religion or other factors.”
When you have no rights (like the basic right to an education) guess what kind of education you get?
A number of solutions exist for preventing statelessness, including something as simple yet effective as birth registrations. “Much of statelessness is caused because stateless people cannot prove their citizenship by birth,” says Geske.
Most important of all, nation-states cannot rely on the law alone to address the problem, experts say.
“What we’re starting to begin is a more comprehensive response to statelessness,” says Mr. Leclerc, pointing out that humanitarian aid, political support, awareness raising, and links with development agencies are vital ingredients. The approach, he says, helped win citizenship last year for 190,000 people in Sri Lanka, one of the longest cases of stateless in the world.
The world has so many problems!!! (just had to get that off my chest)
P.S.: I am addicted to this blog now. I discovered it recently, and can’t stop checking for new content.
“…since national identity is the most fundamental of human rights – indeed, the very right to have rights.”
And the fact that the above is as a practical matter true is precisely the problem with political liberalism, from the French Revolution to Anglo-American liberalism in the 19th century and onwards to our times. Over half a century ago Hannah Arendt wrote movingly of the plight of not only the stateless, but of how “modern” nation states, and the creation of such nation states (premised, typically, on “one” people, “one” nation, “one” everything) almost demands the manufacture of statelessness, by way of defining a whole class of people as not belonging to the new state. The world saw this with the wholesale expulsion of Jews from Egypt, Iraq, and other Arab countries when Israel was declared; with the flight of the Palestinians in 1948; with the mind-boggling population transfers of 1947-48 between India and Pakistan; with the “Biharis” of Bangladesh, and not to mention many cases spawned by various conflicts in Africa. In fact we see it internally in countries too: in India, the number of displaced in Tripura has been said to be in the vicinity of 75,000; 100,000 Muslims fled their homes (or were driven away) in the Gujarat pogroms; 500-800,000 Kashmiri pundits fled (or were driven away) when the independence movement in Kashmir began in earnest in 1989-90.
I am not sure if according “more rights” is an adequate solution when such a rights-based discourse and way of thinking (specifically the way in which, for all the talk of human rights, as a practical matter rights remain hostage to nationality) is itself part of the problem.
Some links/work that I’ve found useful: One, Two.
PS– phrasing the problem far more eloquently than I ever could, here’s Giorgio Agamben:
“…The reasons for this impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic machines, but in the basic notions themselves that regulate the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the legal order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled chapter 5 of her book Imperialism, dedicated to the problem of refugees, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” This formulation – which inextricably links the fates of the rights of man and the modern national state, such that the end of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former – should be taken seriously. The paradox here is that precisely the figure that should have incarnated the rights of man par excellence, the refugee, constitutes instead the radical crisis of this concept. “The concept of the Rights of man,” Arendt writes, “based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, collapsed in ruins as soon as those who professed it found themselves for the first time before men who had truly lost every other specific quality and connection except for the mere fact of being humans.” In the nation-state system, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens of a state. … That there is no autonomous space within the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure man in himself is evident at least in the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of the refugee is always considered a temporary condition that should lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A permanent status of man in himself is inconceivable for the law of the nation-state.”
great post abhi. so sad…its all so sad.
Oh thank God! Non-Toral related hand wringing (and generally a great post Abhi).
Statelessness is the untold dark side of new nations
Especially of new nations predicated on various mono-identities, as Umair points out. It’s a little odd that stranded Pakistanis exist in Bangladesh given that South Asian nations don’t have especially efficient state procedures to enforce and check citizenship (I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that millions of Bangladeshis have no proof of identity), but of course when states are carved out on ethnicity and/or religion, these can be remarkably efficient enforcers of citizenship…
Yes nice post Abhi. [Let not the number of comments be an indication of our appreciation of the post]. And thanks for the links Umair: lots to read.
Say, Ashvin, how did the tee turn out? I’ve never ordered from Spreadshirt before.
No complaints so far. I haven’t put it in the laundry yet though.
wow.
i’m taking International Law at Emory right now… and we just learned about the effects of not having a nationality. the sick thing is that every case that was cited was from the early 1900s. And our most recent example was this guy who was living in the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris.
i think it’s just horrendous that this is still going on!
A really good and insightful post.
Desi wrote
Yeah i’m getting addicted to this blog too. I have a game going on to see when I read a story on the RSS feeds and then i wait to see whens its picked up by SM.