UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Cate Blanchett and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi wrote an op-ed on Le Monde to urge the world to #EndStatelessness. UNHCR launched Global Alliance to End Statelessness, a new alliance to end statelessness.

Cate is a guest speaker at ÖGNI Sustainability Symposium on Thursday, held in Vienna, Austria.

UNHCR

The international legal definition of a stateless person is “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”. In simple terms, this means that a stateless person does not have the nationality of any country. Some people are born stateless, but others become stateless.

Stateless people are found in all regions of the world. The majority of stateless people were born in the countries in which they have lived their entire lives.

A new Global Alliance to End Statelessness was launched in Geneva on Monday with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi urging States, UN agencies, civil society, stateless-led organizations, academia, the private sector and others to, “Join the alliance, join this historic effort.”

The Global Alliance was launched on the first day of the annual Executive Committee meeting of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in Geneva. It will build on the successes of the decade-long #IBelong campaign, which has made important progress towards ending statelessness since 2014, including more than a half a million people worldwide acquiring citizenship.

While the #IBelong campaign was a UNHCR-led effort to raise awareness and catalyze action, the Global Alliance represents a concerted shift toward multistakeholder collaboration. UNHCR will play a key role and host the Global Alliance’s Secretariat, and efforts will be led by a 15-member Advisory Committee. This new initiative seeks to accelerate action on pledges to resolve statelessness, including those made during the two Global Refugee Fora.

“It is my great honour to officially launch the Global Alliance to End Statelessness. This is an effort to bring together a broader coalition of governments, civil society, international organizations, academia and those that have been affected by statelessness,” Grandi said. “It will be a place to exchange best practices, to try to identify and develop solutions and to advocate collectively for this cause.”

UN: Half a million stateless people got citizenship in past decade

The UN said Friday (11 October, 2024) that in the decade since it launched a campaign to end the limbo of statelessness, over half a million people without a nationality had acquired citizenship.

In a report, the United Nations’ refugee agency detailed the progress made since it launched its #IBelong campaign in 2014. Its aim was to mobilise international action to resolve the problem of statelessness.

The UNHCR described statelessness as “a major human rights violation”.

It leaves people politically and economically marginalised, unable to access critical services and particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, the agency argued.

Last year, the UNHCR reported that there were 4.4 million stateless people recorded, but that millions more were affected since the data only covers around half of the world’s countries.

The campaign, which ends this year, aimed to address “a largely invisible crisis: that of millions of people around the world living in the shadows, without a nationality, unable to assert their most basic human rights”, said UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi.

Australian actor Cate Blanchett, UNHCR’s goodwill ambassador, said the progress had been “remarkable”.

“Twenty countries have improved rights for stateless people, (and) 13 countries have passed laws to ensure that no child is born stateless,” she said. “We must make sure that anyone still living without nationality is given the right to be recognised and included.” 

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High Commissioner @FilippoGrandi and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Cate Blanchett urge the world to act now to #EndStatelessness.

Millions live without nationality, facing abuse, detention and expulsion. It’s time for change.

??Read their joint op-ed.https://t.co/e083wNSxoJ pic.twitter.com/9hUEih23mf

— UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (@Refugees) October 16, 2024

Cate Blanchett, Filippo Grandi: No justification for statelessness

Imagine discovering one day that your identity has been erased. Your passport, driving licence, bank cards, birth certificate, any of the numbers or other identifiers that prove your existence as a citizen, have disappeared.

You can’t get a job or have a bank account and basic benefits are not an option as you don’t officially exist. But your family needs feeding, so you take any work you can find – irregular, poorly paid, maybe dangerous. You’d call a relative to ask for help but your phone isn’t working because your SIM card has vanished. No school has any record of your child so is unable to register her, and the classroom door shuts in her face.

Met the love of your life? You might not even be able to get officially married. No doctor has any record of you, so if you are ill or injured you soldier on alone. Without a nationality and the rights that come with it, you live in fear of abuse, arrest, detention and even expulsion from the country you call home.

This gives you a taste of how things are for stateless people – though for many of them statelessness is not a sudden affliction but something they have endured since birth.

You’d understand something of Tebogo’s ordeal – a boy who never knew his father, lost his mother to illness, and whose grandparents never had identity papers because South Africa’s former apartheid regime deemed that non-whites did not require them. It took a ten-year battle before he was finally issued a birth certificate in 2023, at the age of 25, confirming his South African nationality.

And you’d see how Meepia, abandoned as a baby and raised by relatives who were also stateless, struggled for decades to get access to formal employment, basic rights and services in northern Thailand. Not until she was 34 did she manage to acquire Thai citizenship.

These are just two of the stories recently highlighted by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. They are only two of more than 4.4 million people globally who are reported as being stateless or of undetermined nationality. Indeed, the true number is likely to be much higher; you don’t get counted when you’re invisible, and data is available for only about half the world’s countries.

The effects of statelessness are pernicious. Stateless people describe feelings of being in limbo, living in the shadows, belonging nowhere. And even though there is a ready solution – the grant of nationality – the problem persists. In a world where so much depends on us being recognized as citizens, this is a profound injustice.

For the past decade, UNHCR has led a campaign called IBelong to address the challenge. Over that period, more than 565,900 stateless people have acquired a nationality.

For example, in recent years Kenya has granted nationality to members of the Makonde, Shona and Pemba minorities. Kyrgyzstan was the first country to resolve all known cases of statelessness. Turkmenistan has become the second country to end statelessness and other Central Asian states are following suit. Vietnam has addressed statelessness among former Cambodian refugees and ethnic minority groups. Many other countries have adopted laws to ensure no child is born stateless.

Yet statelessness endures. It can be the result of deliberate discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity, religion, language or gender – changes in the law that strip persecuted groups of their nationality even if they have lived in the same place for generations. The Rohingya, for example, one of the largest affected groups, are stateless both within Myanmar (due to a discriminatory citizenship law) and outside it as refugees.

Twenty-four countries still do not let women pass on their nationality to their children on an equal basis with men. Consequently, children can be left stateless when fathers are stateless, unknown, missing or deceased, piling another injustice on top of gender discrimination.

Sometimes, the causes are less malign – perhaps because nationality laws fail to ensure no one is rendered stateless, or due to bureaucratic obstacles that make it difficult or impossible to acquire or prove one’s citizenship or have a birth registered.

But there are concrete steps that can and must be taken. Many countries are yet to implement reforms that would confer nationality on stateless people and prevent childhood statelessness. Despite several recent accessions, less than half of UN member states are parties to the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions. Millions of children are still not being registered at birth, which significantly increases the risk of statelessness.

The need for action is as urgent as ever. That is why we have created the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, which will unite states, UN agencies, civil society, stateless-led organizations and many others to work together and share good practices, build on the best ways of preventing and resolving statelessness, encourage political and legal reform, and give stateless people a voice.

This is about more than navigating the everyday world. It is about the fundamental need to belong, to be seen, and to be granted the full rights that are due to all citizens. There is no justification for statelessness, and the solutions are at our fingertips. It’s a man-made problem that we must eradicate – for good.

ÖGNI Sustainability Symposium

“When we think about sustainability, we think of renewable energy, electric cars or green technologies – but we often overlook the enormous impact that buildings have on our carbon footprint,” explains Cate Blanchett about the role of the real estate industry in a sustainable future, “the physical environment – our homes, workplaces, places of leisure – is an enormous part of what we leave to future generations.”

Sources: UNHCR – #IBelong, UNHCR -New Global Alliance, Context, Heute