Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Citizenship has been said to be the right to have rights.
It's the essential foundation
of your legal identity, of your legal being
in the world.
Being a citizen is often essential
to basic things like housing,
healthcare, education, the kinds of things that everybody needs in order to
live a decent human life.
Statelessness has been around as long as citizenship.
A problem whereby
people are not recognized as citizens by any state,
so they have no home.
They don't have a birth certificate, they don't have any legal identity card,
and they can't get it. It's really hard for them to get it, or the government makes it impossible for them
to get it.
Many stateless persons are
living where they have lived all their lives,
and where their parents have lived all their lives.
They have fundamental problems, but they have never crossed a border.
Statelessness causes people not to be able to go to school.
It has health impact because they can't get healthcare. It has economic impact
because they can't get a job. And it has a human security impact because people who are
stateless are more vulnerable to violence.
But even beyond those terrible human aspects, at an individual level we've seen, repeatedly,
that statelessness is a source of armed conflict.
Everyone is threatened, so we all have an interest in ensuring human security and
citizenship for everyone.
Citizenship is integral to open society.
All persons have a right to participate in the communities where they live.
And stateless persons are denied that right.
We need to do a better job of ensuring that laws make it easy and
accessible for people to become citizens,
and make it hard for states to deny
or deprive people of citizenship.