In Transit to Nowhere—Personal Accounts of Statelessness in the 21st Century

Today, more than eleven million people around the world are citizens of no state.  From Kenya to the Dominican Republic, states manipulate their citizenship laws, condemning whole ethnic groups born and raised inside their borders to statelessness, stripping them of the fundamental rights to political participation, freedom of movement, education, and employment.

The right to citizenship is under threat as never before. Since the collapse of communism in Europe, ethnic nationalism has led to the exclusion of minorities from citizenship in a number of new or successor states. In Africa, latent ethnic tensions arising from decolonization and state-building, combined with the growing significance of political rights in emerging democracies, have sparked armed conflict and left racial and ethnic minorities on the margins of society. In Asia and the Middle East, discriminatory citizenship laws perpetuate women’s inequality and disenfranchise unpopular ethnic groups. Around the world, discrimination is both a cause and consequence of statelessness. Stateless people are subject to social exclusion, sexual and physical violence, and many other human rights violations. Deliberately marginalized by governments, they remain the ultimate forgotten people, falling outside the protection and assistance of aid agencies and the United Nations.

The Open Society Justice Initiative presented a panel discussion featuring testimony by stateless people from Kenya, Burma, Pakistan, and the Dominican Republic who have joined their voices to the growing international effort to close the gap between the reality of statelessness and the promise and obligation of human rights protection.

The following advocates discussed what it means to be stateless and what they see as the necessary next steps in addressing this growing crisis: 

• Adam Hussein Adam was born in and has lived his entire life in Kenya as a member of the ethnic group of Kenyan Nubians.  The British colonial army forcibly conscripted these Nubians from Sudan and displaced them to settlements in Kenya.  Although Nubian families have been settled in Kenya for generations, the Kenyan government does not recognize them as an ethnic minority group and denies them equal access to citizenship.  Among other rights violations, Adam has been denied access to education and the right to freedom of movement. Today he is fighting to end discrimination against Kenyan Nubians.
• Naw Htoo Paw is a Karen activist who fled from Burma to Thailand in 2001 after growing up in a village where Burmese soldiers frequently forced the villagers to act as porters, raped local women, killed suspected Karen sympathizers and burnt their houses. The Karen are indigenous to lands along the frontier of Burma and Thailand and are persecuted by the Burmese government and denied citizenship by the Thai. In Thailand, the Karen are one of the ethnic minority Hill Tribe people whom the Thai government refuses to recognize as citizens.
• Syed Kamal is a dual national of Canada and Pakistan. In 2003 he began his work for the eradication of statelessness in Bangladesh, motivated by a feeling of personal responsibility to the victims of Pakistan's arbitrary denial of nationality to nearly 250,00 ethnic Urdu speakers in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
• Sonia Pierre was born on a batey, an impoverished community of Haitian sugar cane workers living in the Dominican Republic. She grew up experiencing the social, economic, and cultural barriers that prevent Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent from enjoying their basic human rights. A leader in the struggle against violence, discrimination and racism against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, she has received numerous human rights awards, and is an internationally recognized human rights advocate.

The panel was moderated by Julia Harrington, Senior Legal Officer of the Justice Initiative.

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