Source: http://refugeelegalaidinformation.com/statelessness
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 05:53:08+00:00

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Please see their biographies below.
Eric Fripp is a barrister practicing in asylum, immigration, and nationality work, and more widely in public law and human rights cases. He is listed as a Leading Junior in Chambers UK and the UK Legal 500. A longstanding focus of his work concerns the interrelation of statelessness with international, European, and domestic laws concerning refugee status. Important past cases include ST (Ethnic Eritrean-nationality-return) Ethiopia CG  UKUT 00252 (IAC) (deprivation of nationality by Ethiopia from 1998), MA (Ethiopia)  EWCA Civ 289;  INLR 1 (question not how claimant would be treated if returned to country of former nationality, but whether she faced exclusion which prevented her return), and EB (Ethiopia)  EWCA Civ 809;  QB 1, (1951 Refugee Convention covers adverse measures including, where a Convention reason arises, arbitrary deprivation of nationality and attached rights).
Katia Bianchini is a lawyer and researcher specialized in immigration, refugee law and statelessness. Katia is qualified in New York, England, and Wales. She practiced immigration law for over ten years both in the United States and in Oxford. Katia holds a PhD from York University, UK, where she graduated with a thesis on the implementation of the Convention relation to the status of stateless persons in 10 European States. She has published on immigration, refugee law and statelessness.
This page sets out to provide a coherent account accessible to the lawyer or interested reader concerning issues which arise in relation to the 1951 Refugee Convention as regards stateless persons who seek to establish entitlement to refugee status thereunder. Wherever possible I will try to provide an account of relevant judicial decisions from different courts or legal systems, though my own experience and linguistic competence means that a bias towards English language decisions, and decisions of courts and tribunals in England and Wales, is perhaps inevitable. The page sets out to provide some account of applicable legal principles but does not purport to provide legal advice as to any particular situation.
For those readers who are not already aware of this, a vital source of free, independent and non-profit access to worldwide legal materials, including all decisions referred to below, is provided by the World Legal Information Institute and by associated national or regional entities including the British and Irish Legal Information Institute and Canadian Legal Information Institute. Another good source of free access to relevant materials is through the Refworld site maintained by the staff of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
(ii) stateless (“not having a nationality”) and being outside the country of his or her former habitual residence, unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to the country of former habitual residence.
The question has sometimes arisen, whether the recognition of a person as a Convention ‘refugee’ is a constitutive or merely a declaratory act.
Courts in the United Kingdom have adopted a similar position: vid. R (Hoxha) v SSHD  EWCA Civ 1403;  Imm AR 211 at .
Prior to the 1951 Convention there has frequently been no distinction drawn between stateless persons and refugees, two classes of persons who were defined by the shared characteristic of being unable or unwilling to rely on the protection of the State from which they originated. For instance, the League of Nations Arrangement of 12 May 1926 relating to the issue of identity certificates to Russian and Armenian Refugees defined “refugees” belonging to the respective groups as “Russian: Any person of Russian origin who does not enjoy or who no longer enjoys the protection of the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and who has not acquired another nationality” and “Armenian: Any person of Armenian origin formerly a subject of the Ottoman Empire who does not enjoy or who no longer enjoys the protection of the Government of the Turkish Republic and who has not acquired another nationality” (League of Nations Treaty Series Vol LXXXIX, No 2004). The League of Nations Convention of 28 October, 1933 relating to the International Status of Refugees at article 1 adopted the definition of Russian, Armenian, and other refugees as defined in previous Arrangements (League of Nations Treaty Series Vol CLIX, No 3663).
The practice of making little, if any, distinction between stateless persons and refugees continued into and through the Second World War. The 1951 Convention represented a decisive break with this, its protection being restricted to a subclass of those without the protection of a State, the subclass consisting in those who were outside their country of nationality or former habitual residence and who possessed a WFFPCR. In practice those persons who, whether or not they are stateless, are refugees within the scope of the 1951 Convention, in most cases have superior protections to any which are given to stateless people under the separate treaty regime relating to statelessness: the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless People and 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. For these reasons, and notwithstanding efforts by some states, by non-governmental organisations, and by UNHCR, which has a special mandate relating to statelessness granted by the UN General Assembly, statelessness is an enduring phenomenon, affecting at least 11 million people worldwide today, and it is frequently important to be able to ascertain whether a stateless person qualifies as a refugee under the 1951 Convention.
The 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless People defines the term "stateless person" as meaning “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”. This obviously covers a very broad range of circumstances, including for example (i) the absence of a legal entitlement to nationality of any State, and (ii) the refusal of a State to acknowledge an individual’s legal entitlement to nationality, whether for reasons such as the absence of evidence, or as a consequence of official or semi-official policy or practice of the authorities of a State.
There are two categories of stateless persons: de jure and de facto.
1. Stateless persons de jure are persons who are not nationals of any State, either because at birth or subsequently they were not given any nationality, or because during their lifetime they lost their own nationality and did not acquire a new one.
Although in law the status of stateless persons de facto differs appreciably from that of stateless persons de jure, in practice it is similar.
In order to determine his terms of reference, the Secretary-General must refer to the Council resolution which invests him with this mandate.
This resolution mentions the protection of “stateless persons” but it does not refer at all to “refugees”.
Clearly, the fact that refugees are not mentioned does not mean that they must be excluded from the scope of the present study. In fact, a considerable majority of stateless persons are at present refugees. These refugees are de jure stateless persons if they have been deprived of their nationality by their country of origin. They are de facto stateless persons if without having been deprived of their nationality they no longer enjoy the protection and assistance of their national authorities, as it has been said under No. III above.
It is evident, however, that if the study on the position of stateless persons must include refugees who are de jure or de facto stateless persons, it must also consider those stateless persons who are not refugees, even though this group is much less numerous than that of refugees who are stateless and even though its position is in certain respects more favourable than that of stateless refugees. For example, the stateless person who is not a refugee can obtain documents establishing his civil status from the authorities of the countries where these documents were originally issued, because these authorities have no reason to refuse them to him.
Normally every individual belongs to a national community and feels himself a part of it. He enjoys the protection and assistance of the national authorities. When he is abroad, his own national authorities look after him and provide him with certain advantages. The organization of the entire legal and economic life of the individual residing in a foreign country depends upon his possession of a nationality.
The fact that the stateless person has no nationality places him in an abnormal and inferior position which reduces his social value and destroys his own self-confidence.
During the long period of peace and social stability at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, stateless persons were few and their situation was tolerable. Life was not highly organized as it is today and foreigners, whatever their status, enjoyed considerable freedom. The stateless person succeeded in making a place for himself in a country and finding a milieu to his liking. He was free to find employment as a wage-earner, to practice a craft or engage in trade. If his conduct was unobjectionable he was not troubled by the police, which exercised no special supervision over foreigners, and he could lead a more or less normal existence, without his legal disability causing him any serious difficulties.
Since the First World War, in Europe at any rate, the situation has completely changed. The re-establishment of the passport and visa system, the increased control over foreigners, the regulations governing all aspects of social life (work, exercise of professions, food, housing, movement within the country, and so on) bring the stateless person in constant contact with the authorities and make him conscious of his handicapped status.
The effect of statelessness can best be approached through a short account of the effects of nationality for someone who is not stateless. These in most cases are not accessible to stateless people, indeed the absence of these is almost definitive of statelessness itself.
21. In no case may a person be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his or her own country. The reference to the concept of arbitrariness in this context is intended to emphasize that it applies to all State action, legislative, administrative and judicial; it guarantees that even interference provided for by law should be in accordance with the provisions, aims and objectives of the Covenant and should be, in any event, reasonable in the particular circumstances. The Committee considers that there are few, if any, circumstances in which deprivation of the right to enter one's own country could be reasonable. A State party must not, by stripping a person of nationality or by expelling an individual to a third country, arbitrarily prevent this person from returning to his or her own country.
(iii) As already observed by Weis in the passage quoted above, internal protection within a state may rest on an entitlement to nationality (or citizenship). As is well known, an alien possesses no general right even to remain in or to enter or reside in a State.
As already set out, the 1951 Convention refugee definition requires not only an absence of national protection, of the type which identifies a stateless person, but also a WFFPCR. In England and Wales the Court of Appeal, Civil Division, has held decisively that statelessness in itself is not sufficient to produce entitlement under the 1951 Convention: Revenko v Secretary of State for the Home Department  EWCA Civ 500;  QB 601 (31 July 2000).
47. …That line of argument is beset with difficulties. I am far from satisfied that there is a true analogy between a state's denial of entry to one of its own citizens and denial of entry to a stateless person (who, unlike a citizen, has no right of entry into the country), or that denial of entry to a stateless person can be said to constitute a denial of his third category rights of sufficient severity to amount to persecution (especially given the possibility of his exercising those rights elsewhere).
26. It is now necessary to confront the question whether, in principle, it is persecutory without more, to deny a stateless person re-entry to "the country of his former habitual residence". In my judgment, it is not. The denial does not interfere with a stateless person's rights in the way that it does with the rights of a national. There is a fundamental distinction between nationals and stateless persons in that respect. It is one thing to protect a stateless person from persecutory return to the country of his former habitual residence (as the Refugee Convention does), but it would be quite another thing to characterise a denial of re-entry as persecutory. The lot of a stateless person is an unhappy one, but to deny him a right that he has never enjoyed is not, in itself, persecution. Stateless persons are themselves the subject of an international treaty, namely the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (1954). The United Kingdom is a party to that Convention but it has not been incorporated into domestic law and Miss Collier does not suggest that it protects the appellant in this case.
This has been followed by further decisions of the same Court in MT (Palestinian Territories) v Secretary of State for the Home Department  EWCA Civ 1149 (22 October 2008) and SH (Palestinian Territories) v Secretary of State for the Home Department  EWCA Civ 1150 (22 October 2008). Insofar as the Court has consistently held that refusal to permit return does not per se constitute persecution, this must be correct- see MA (Ethiopia) v Secretary of State for the Home Department  EWCA Civ 289;  INLR 1 (02 April 2009) to compare the position in deprivation cases- but the author would respectfully suggest that the MA (Palestinian Territories) case, and those which have followed it, should not be taken as authority that refusal to permit return will never constitute persecution. The Canadian position and that in England and Wales are potentially reconcilable on that basis, as is the developing authority and guidance concerning article 12 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which provides that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.", that is, a right to re-enter which is not limited to nationals.
The Equal Rights Trust (ERT) is an independent international organisation whose purpose is to combat discrimination and promote equality as a fundamental human right and a basic principle of social justice. Their two year project entitled Detention of Stateless Persons resulted in the report Unravelling Anomaly: Detention, Discrimination and the Protection Needs of Stateless Persons (July 2010). The project looked at strengthening the protection of stateless persons in any kind of detention or imprisonment due at least in part to their being stateless, and to ensuring they can exercise their right to be free from arbitrary detention without discrimination.
Refugees International is an independent, Washington-DC based non-profit organisation that advocates for lifesaving assistance and protection for displaced people and promotes solutions to displacement crises. The agency focuses on: (1) Neglected Crises; (2) Return and Reintegration; (3) Peacekeeping; (4) Internal Displacement; and (5) Statelessness.
RI’s statelessness initiative began after the 2005 release of Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness (2005). This initiative has included visits to over a dozen countries, and continues through follow up reports like the March 2009 release of Nationality Rights for All: A Progress Report and Global Survey on Statelessness (2009).
See also the earlier version.
See also two earlier papers by same author from 2009 (abstract only) and 2010 (full-text).
In order to bring together NGOs working on these issues, in 2011 it was decided to set up the European Network on Statelessness (ENS) which conducts and supports advocacy, awareness-raising, training and legal development activities aimed at addressing statelessness. The network will now look for funding to expand its activities in 2012 and beyond.

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