By
Elizabeth Gibson
Statelessness
is normally the purview of systematic discrimination, mass displacement, or
state death – Rohingya living in a state of eternal limbo in refugee camps, families
of Haitian descent trapped as an underclass in the Dominican Republic, or
former residents of the Soviet Union who were abroad when their country
literally ceased to exist.
Now,
the United Kingdom is toying with making statelessness a punishment, and the
international human rights community is less than amused (to use some British
understatement).
A
stateless person has no recognized citizenship in any country. Real statelessness is not just having your passport
revoked (like Edward Snowden), it is legal non-existence, a lack of the “right
to have rights.” During the House of Lords debate on a proposed immigration bill amendment today, Baroness Helena Kennedy
explained:
“Deprivation
[of citizenship], with all its consequences in the modern world, is equivalent
to a penal sanction of the most serious kind, but imposed without a criminal
trial, without a conviction, without close and open examination of the
evidence, and without an effective opportunity of defence, contrary to the
requirements of due process.”
Now,
in fairness, statelessness exists in every country to varying extents – there
are an estimated 12 million stateless people in the world. There also are other cases of states stripping someone's nationality based on national security or moral character. However, most of
the world is seeking to reduce statelessness, and countries like the United
Kingdom generally receive stateless people from other parts of the world but
rarely create statelessness. For example, the United States just reworked its nationality law to eliminate a rare form of
accidental statelessness last month, and the United Kingdom itself was
applauded by the
U.N. Refugee Agency last year for introducing a mechanism that created a path
to legal status for stateless persons.
