People without a country ...
CRISIS: WORLD BANK CLAIMS SA HAS MORE THAN 15 MILLION UNREGISTERED MIGRANTS
Third of stateless are children, who are denied basic rights.
The world is sitting on a time bomb of a growing mass of stateless people who find themselves destitute in foreign countries, with the United Nations (UN) High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimating a child is born nationless every 10 minutes.
A third of those who are stateless, are children, said Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), who are working closely with the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders to address the plight of those deemed not to belong to any state.
While South Africa has not yet quantified the scale of the crisis of a stateless population within its borders, the World Bank claims that the country has over 15 million unregistered people.
Hélène Caux, UNHCR Southern Africa spokesperson said an issue of concern is the entry and treatment of stateless children.
“By definition, they have no passports and therefore cannot legally travel and have their rights adequately protected.
“Stateless migrants, including children, are particularly vulnerable to abuses of every form.
“The entire legal and economic life of an individual residing in a foreign country, depends on being in possession of a nationality.
“Having no definite legal status and lacking protection, stateless persons become legally invisible and encounter great and often insurmountable difficulties, such as indefinite detention or serial expulsions,” Caux said.
The UN refugee agency is leading an international crusade – #I Belong – to protect people forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution.
The UN body is determined to end statelessness by 2024 – mobilising every member of the public to sign an open letter and become part of the campaign “to end injustice” by ensuring that stateless people are granted a nationality.
It also delivers lifesaving assistance such as shelter, food and water to refugees to safeguard their fundamental human rights.
According to Caux, South Africa is not yet a party to the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons (CSSP), but in 2011 pledged to accede to it.
The CSSP guarantees human rights for stateless migrants, establishing an internationally recognised status for them.
Liesl Muller of the LHR Statelessness Unit’s Refugee and Migrant Rights programme, describes stateless people as “foreign nationals in every country in the world”.
“They are not considered to be citizens by any country.
“The UNHCR’s latest estimate is that a third of them are children. Actual figures are difficult to confirm, because they are not counted in a census.
“The problem is that there are no official figures,” Muller said.
While she welcomed the department of home affairs’ latest policy shift to do away with the requirement for travelling unaccompanied children to produce documents like an unabridged birth certificate upon entering the country, Muller says government “needs to count and plan for stateless persons”.
“Requiring additional vetting at the border by requiring a birth certificate is unnecessary additional bureaucracy, which does not benefit the child, but discourages tourism.
The lack of a passport, says Caux, is “a severe obstacle to the establishment of a person’s nationality”.
Working in collaboration with organs of civil society, government and other UN agencies, the UNHCR focuses on identification, prevention, reduction and protection of stateless people.
Wars and armed conflict. It has often having been behind people fleeing from countries of their birth.
Gaps in nationality laws, which if not carefully written and correctly applied, lead to the exclusion of some people.
The emergence of new states and changes in borders.