Newsletter | November 2021

Welcome to the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness November 2021 newsletter. We are pleased to once again share with you our current activities, publications and opportunities, as well as relevant news and developments across the world.

Prof Hilary Charlesworth elected to the International Court of Justice

PMCS Advisory Board Chair Prof Hilary Charlesworth has become the first Australian woman to be elected to the International Court of Justice.  Based in The Hague in the Netherlands, the court is often referred to as the "World Court". Its role is to settle legal disputes between countries and give advisory opinions on legal questions that have been referred to it by other United Nations organs. Distinguished Professor Charlesworth was elected to the court with an absolute majority of votes cast by the 193 member states of the United Nations. A heartfelt congratulations to Hilary!

Critical Statelessness Studies Blog 

In the latest contribution to the CSS Blog - 

Refugeeness doesn’t trump statelessness: A call to reject the UN’s “protection hierarchy” for stateless refugees

Jason Tucker, Associate Senior Lecturer at Malmö University, challenges the ways in which the international community programmatically engages with stateless refugees. Drawing on his research investigating the governance of stateless refugees, Jason argues that the statelessness of stateless refugees is systematically and chronically under-valued, sometimes with devastating consequences.  Read the full piece.

Statelessness in the Asia Pacific – Virtual Roundtable

Over 26–27 October, the UNHCR and PMCS brought together an invited group of scholars to discuss developments in academic research and education on the identification, reduction and prevention of statelessness, as well as the protection of stateless persons in Asia and the Pacific. The virtual roundtable built on the conclusions and recommendations of an earlier workshop convened by UNHCR, PMCS and the Social Research Institute of Chulalongkorn University in 2019. Each session was directed at mapping statelessness-related academic initiatives in the region, both in the research and teaching space and with an emphasis on digital research tools, legal clinic initiatives and collaboration.

The roundtable closed with a planning session for identifying how participants can continue and develop a statelessness research network. With commitments to ongoing shared learning, the roundtable was an exciting step towards a more connected research community in Asia and the Pacific.

Event recordings available - 

Perpetual Strangerhood: Experiences of Highly Skilled African-Australian Professionals in the Workplace

Dr Kathomi Gatwiri, senior social work lecturer in the Faculty of Health at Southern Cross University and practising psychotherapist, presented as part of the Migration, Refugees and Statelessness Seminar Series on 7 October 2021. View recording.

The High Court of Australia and Civil Liberties

On 13 October 2021, the Melbourne Law School presented the online public lecture ‘The High Court of Australia and Civil Liberties’, in collaboration with the Alan Missen Trust and the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies. PMCS Director Prof Michelle Foster joined an expert panel that critically analysed a series of recent important decisions by the High Court of Australia on civil liberties in the fields of immigration law, law enforcement, and Indigenous rights. View recording.

60 years on - The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness 

On 16 September 2021, UNHCR and PMCS were pleased to offer this event featuring an expert panel in discussion about various facets of the 1961 Convention.

At the event, it was announced that the Stateless Children Legal Clinic, a partnership between PMCS and the Refugee Advice Casework Service (RACS), has received a significant grant from the Cameron Foundation, enabling it to run for the next five years. Launched as a pilot in March 2021, the Clinic is the first of its kind in Australia and the third globally. It offers Juris Doctor students at Melbourne Law School the opportunity to develop practical legal skills and directly assist in the delivery of essential legal services to stateless children in their application for Australian citizenship. The grant has been named after Hiam Chalouhy, whose son Fadi Chalouhy now resides in Australia. Fadi is the first stateless person to be granted an Australian skilled migrant visa through the ‘Talent Beyond Boundaries’ program.

At the event, Fadi spoke about his mother's legacy and his personal experience growing up stateless, saying that the work of PMCS and RACS, through activities such as the Stateless Children Legal Clinic, helps to raise awareness of the global problem of statelessness and provide crucial legal services to vulnerable people and families. “For 25 years my mother and I struggled to find answers or even understand what statelessness is, and how to fight it. This clinic will give every mother and child currently in this situation a fighting chance,” he said.

View event recording

Statelessness & Citizenship Review

 A special symposium on Citizenship and Statelessness in India, exploring the citizenship crisis in India, was published in October. The symposium features three articles, a critique and comment and an editorial written by PMCS Senior Research Fellow Adil Khan.

Peter McMullin Centre staff publications

Michelle Foster (with Cathryn Costello), 'Race Discrimination Effaced at the International Court of Justice' (2021).  AJIL Unbound, 115, 339-344. 

When a person is not recognised as a citizen anywhere, they are typically referred to as 'stateless'. This can give rise to challenges both for individuals and for the institutions that try to govern them. Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship breaks from tradition by relocating the 'problem' to be addressed from one of statelessness to one of citizenship. It problematises the governance of citizenship - and the use of citizenship as a governance tool - and traces the 'problem of citizenship' from global and regional governance mechanisms to national and even individual levels.

Part I: Producing and maintaining statelessness
1.   The problem of citizenship in global governance - Tendayi Bloom
2.  'Fonua' cultural statelessness in the Pacific and the effects of climate change - Kate Wilkinson Cross and Pefi Kingi
3.   A regional politics of foreignness and Pakistan's Afghan refugees - Anoshay Fazal
4.  The statelessness of refugees - Jason Tucker
5.   Statelessness and the administrative state: The legal prowess of the first-line bureaucrat in Malaysia - Jamie Chai Yun Liew
6.   Language and statelessness: The impact of political discourses on the Bidoon community in Kuwait - Ahmad Benswait
7.   The weaponisation of citizenship: Punishment, erasure, and social control - Lindsey N. Kingston
8.   Statelessness and governance in the absence of recognition: The case of the 'Donetsk People's Republic' - Nataliia Kasianenko
9.   Legal identity and rebel governance: A comparative perspective on lived consequence of contested sovereignty - Katharine Fortin, Bart Klem, and Marika Sosnowski

Part II: Living with the problem of citizenship
10.   Transnational surrogacy, biocitizenship, and statelessness: India's response to the 'ghosts of the republic' - Pragna Paramita Mondal
11.   The birth certificate as fetish object in the governance of citizenship and its presumed sex and gender norms - Jan Lukas Buterman
12.   Seeking 'a right to belong': A stateless Shan youth's journey to citizenship in northern Thailand - Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul
13.   Being excluded or excluding yourself?: Citizenship choices among stateless youth in Estonia - Maarja Vollmer
14.   Statelessness and governance at the periphery: 'Nomadic' populations and the modern state in Thailand, Côte d'Ivoire, and Lebanon - Christoph Sperfeldt
15.   Ageing and stateless: Non-decisionism and state violence across temporal and geopolitical space from Bhutan to the United States - Odessa Gonzalez Benson, Yoosun Park, Francis Tom Temprosa, and Dilli Gautam
16.   Asking the 'other questions': Applying intersectionality to understand statelessness in Europe - Deirdre Brennan, Nina Murray, and Allison J. Petrozziello

Part III: Rethinking governance
17.   The ethics of quantifying statelessness - Heather Alexander
18.   Registering persons at risk of statelessness in Kenya: Solutions or further problems? - Edwin O. Abuya
19.   Too little too late? Naturalisation of stateless Kurds and transitional justice in Syria - Haqqi Bahram
20.   Statelessness elimination through legal fiction: The United Arab Emirates' Comorian minority - Yoana Kuzmova
21.   Supra-national jurisprudence: Necessary but insufficient to contest statelessness in the Dominican Republic - Bridget Wooding
22.   'Civil society advocacy: Using norms to promote progress on the Global Action Plan to End Statelessness - Melissa Schnyder
23.   The construction of a Brazilian 'hospitality policy' and the adoption of a new legal framework for stateless persons - Thiago Assunção
24.   Ideological governance of citizen and non-citizen others in Kuwait - Areej Alshammiry
25.   'We are not stateless! You can call us what you like, but we are citizens of Myanmar!': Rohingya resistance and the stateless label - Natalie Brinham
26.   United Stateless in the United States: Reflections from an activist - Ekaterina E

Recent Statelessness Global News and Developments

Statelessness and Climate Change

There is growing discourse about climate refugees among researchers, human rights groups, lawyers and commentators, but some are calling for recognition of the stateless as an especially vulnerable cohort in the face of climate change. Lawyer and activist Tahera Hasan and academic Professor Muhammad Hamid Zaman write that the stateless are likely to ‘fall through the cracks of international attention’ as well as suffer the most as the impacts of climate change become greater.

Bangladesh

Rising violence in the Rohingya camps of Bangladesh has brought a frightening new dimension to the Rohingya crisis. The murder of Mohib Ullah, chairman of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace & Human Rights in Cox’s Bazar (Sept 29) and the subsequent deaths of seven others in the camps have caused a paradigm shift. It is speculated that the prolonged presence of the Rohingya in Bangladesh has created a conducive environment for gangs and terrorist outfits to extend their activities and exploit these people.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is on track to eradicate statelessness by 2022, two years earlier than planned, says the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 1,795 people in BiH, mostly Roma, are no longer stateless since the start of the UNHCR’s iBelong campaign on 2014. The country has some 150 more people in this category.

Iran

 A new Iranian nationality law which was amended in 2019, allows children of Iranian women and non-Iranian men to apply for Iranian citizenship. As a result of the amendment, nearly 75,000 children at risk statelessness are now eligible for citizenship. It has been reported that 29,737 children have filed applications to receive birth certificates and ID cards, with 5000 ID cards having so far been issued. While the law does not give mothers and fathers equal rights to confer nationality to their children, it represents positive progress.

Kuwait

In a push by Kuwait’s government to determine the status of its stateless residents, the bank accounts of hundreds of bedoun have been suspended, freezing access to salary and savings in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Banks are refusing to reinstate accounts until ‘valid identification’ is provided, and Kuwaiti authorities are refusing residency cards unless bedouns accept to be identified at Iraqi citizens.

Malaysia

A five-old-year girl, who was previously stateless, has been granted citizenship by the Malaysian High Court after the government had refused to recognise the child as a citizen. The child was born to a Malaysian father and an unmarried Chinese national mother and was considered illegitimate. The judgement stated that the child fulfilled several conditions to be declared a citizen, including being born in Malaysia after Malaysia Day and one of the parents was Malaysian. The landmark decision has significant broader implications for citizenship applications in Malaysia.

Pakistan

A team of young gymnasts who are excluded from Pakistan’s centralized digital identity system are fighting to be recognized by the state. If successful, up to three million other people in Pakistan who are effectively stateless without the increasingly-important ID card could then be eligible to register. The Imkaan Gymnastics Team has been winning top prizes in international competitions held online during the COVID pandemic, but without the national digital ID, the members are prevented from travelling beyond their home base of Karachi to attend further competitions.

South Africa

After the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of five individuals who brought an urgent application to the Western Cape High Court in 2017, petitioning for the right to apply for South African citizenship; many young stateless people in South Africa have been holding out hope of being issued an ID card. Legal appeals and strategic delays by the Home Affairs office have meant that there is still no avenue for stateless people to apply for citizenship, and the legal battle continues.

South Korea

Third-generation Chinese immigrants who defected to South Korea are not entitled to government support because they maintained their Chinese nationality in North Korea, even though their families lived there for generations. It’s unclear how many Chinese-North Koreans have come to South Korea over the years, but activists say about 30 have been designated as “stateless,” after unsuccessful attempts to pose as North Korean nationals landed them in prison or detention facilities in South Korea.

United Kingdom

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has published a report assessing the human rights implications of Part 1 of the Nationality and Borders Bill. The Committee raises significant concerns that the Bill fails to give adequate effect to the rights of children born in the UK who are stateless and may be in contravention of UN conventions. While the Committee welcomes those aspects of the Bill that seek to end discrimination in nationality law in existing legislation, it calls for the legislation to be amended so that the rights of the child are central to decision making. 

Recent News Articles relating to Statelessness

Africa

Africa: statelessness is still a reality, Africa News, 4 November 2021

Bangladesh

Fear stalks Rohingya refugee camps after murders, Times of India, 10 November 2021

Dhaka shares with Paris security risks from Rohingya crisis, Dhaka Tribune, 10 November 2021

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia expected to eradicate statelessness by end of 2022, Macau Business, 7 November 2021

Malaysia

Vaccinating the ‘hidden’ population of Kuala Lumpur, Free Malaysia Today, 5 November 2021

My son has no future, says dad after citizenship bid dismissed, Free Malaysia Today, 4 November 2021

Philippines

Volunteers boost Sama Bajau birth registration amid pandemic, UNHCR News, 4 November 2021

United Kingdom

Priti Patel’s immigration bill could fail stateless children, MPs warn, Independent, 10 November 2021

South Korea

Seoul rebuffs Chinese North Korean defectors, Taipei Times, 11 November 2021

South Africa

Stateless children fight for citizenship after four-year legal battle, Independent Online, 8 November 2021