Living outside the state
The NYTimes has a short piece on stateless persons, who, as the article notes, tend to be poor and forgotten. Does international law, with its almost exclusive focus on state-based principles, simply ignore these people? Are these just an unlucky “few” who fall by the wayside, or does this hint at larger concerns about the IL system carving people up into groups based on often (though by no means exclusively) artificial “sovereigns”/states? Is this a concern especially outside of the “established” ”Western” powers, that may not have used a state system until very recently, and for which it might still seem to not quite fit?
Of course there has been some IL attempting to deal with stateless persons, including through the UN Convention relating to the status of stateless persons, and the UN Convention on the reduction of statelessness (PDF), though neither has been universally ratified (and here) (both PDF) by any means, which perhaps in part shows the reluctance or inability of states to fully address this issue. The UNHCR discusses the issue as well. And as states come and go, and if nationality or ethnically-based states continue to proliferate (sometimes referred to as ”Balkanization” but now often thought of as a possible future scenario in Iraq), the problems for those excluded by the defined states will likely continue. Unfortunately there seems to be little will in the IL community to address these problems and, almost by definition, these stateless persons lack the means of creating a meaningful political voice.
smm
May 2, 2007 @ 10:24 pm
Statelessness is a complex thing and may be a state of being and a state of mind - forgive the pun. I recently discovered this when my father tried to renew his passport. Zimbabwe is a disaster. My father, who was born in Rhodesia with no birth certificate and grew up in an orphanage then came to the U.S. became a political refugee and temporary British citizen then a citizen of Zim, cannot obtain a passport because he lacks a birth certificate. The consulate - which probably wanted to be bribed - was very unhelpful wanting him to go to Zim without a valid passport and get authentication of his citizenship. (which has to be obtained by going to the mission orphanage where he was raised and getting a priest to swear by it - or by having his oldest male relative swear on his birth - which none will do since he and his brother grew up at the mission). And although he is a professor at a small teaching college, not really a member of the subaltern, I think pretty much these events have rendered him stateless - not in the same way he was stateless during the revolution and when he was a refugee - but stateless all the same and bound to the fate of the United States. It’s funny. I have a U.S. passport but as a black person I have always FELT stateless - here at home in my country I am not a full citizen. (this is apparent in Europe when white people stroke me and buy me food and drink and talk about poor black people and Katrina - they do this right after voting in fascist racist fortress Europe type regimes so I don’t know) Now someone in my family is in a position where his state refuses to claim him unless he goes back to the state - risking likely imprisonment and maybe even death [he was a revolutionary - he is now hoping for grandchildren and a cousin of ours was recently imprisoned with Mugabe claiming he was a spy for Israel]…Green card but no passport…Maybe statelessness only requires that you start out poor and marginalized. After that it can happen to many of us.