This article is more than 5 years old Stateless in Europe: 'We are no people with no nation' This article is more than 5 years old -- Experts are warning that children such as Siba could turn into a stateless generation. Though the infant was born in Berlin after her mother arrived from Damascus, there is no automatic German citizenship. And under Syrian law, a child can only inherit nationality from its father. As a single mother, Sanaa was well aware that Siba would be stateless. “There is no paper for Siba in Syria. Because it’s the law, you don’t -- Although international treaties oblige states to ensure every child’s right to a nationality, European governments are failing to do so, or even to recognise that children are being born stateless at all. The UN released a report this month calling for global action on child statelessness. “In the short time that children get to be children, statelessness can set in stone grave problems that will haunt them throughout their childhoods and sentence them to a life of discrimination, frustration and despair,” said the UN high commissioner -- At least 10 million people globally do not have citizenship of any country, according to the UN. Without nationality, stateless people cannot vote and can find it difficult or impossible to gain access to healthcare, education and employment. The UN estimates that there are 680,000 stateless people in Europe, though experts say the figure is likely to be much higher. There are hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia and Estonia who became “non-citizens” following the fall of the Soviet Union. There are thousands of Roma in Italy and the Balkans left stateless in large part due to the breakup of Yugoslavia. The experiences of these long-term stateless people highlight the dismal fate that awaits Syrian children if their legal nationality is not resolved. -- Beyond Rome’s frenzied centre, the quiet outer suburb of Monte Mario is home to a “nomad camp” where many of the residents are stateless. There is an uneasy calm after the police shut down the camp’s weekly flea market. It’s a regular flashpoint in tense relations between Roma -- will no longer do business with Roma people. As for many stateless people around the world, the problem for the Roma is both a legal failing and one of entrenched discrimination. “Anti-Roma racism is a really powerful force in Europe,” says Adam -- them as members of national communities.” Being stateless and undocumented also reinforces this exclusion. Lacking a proper education or the right to work forces many to look for employment outside the law, in turn fuelling accusations that the Roma are a criminal minority who refuse to integrate. Refugee crisis creates 'stateless generation' of children in limbo Read more And the situation is not limited to Italy. Exclusion from bureaucratic processes means there are still large numbers of Roma at risk of statelessness in the ex-Yugoslav states, as well as in Ukraine and Bulgaria. * * * The 1954 UN convention relating to the status of stateless persons was drawn up in the aftermath of the second world war when statelessness in Europe was rife. Most EU countries have ratified the convention, obliging them to offer the stateless basic rights and protection in much the same way as refugees. But while refugee rights are recognised internationally, with asylum procedures to determine who is entitled to such protection, only a handful of European countries have formal procedures to recognise the stateless. Michel*, 35, was one of the first people to benefit from the UK’s statelessness determination procedure after it was introduced in 2013. An orphan, he was brought up in a madrasa – an Islamic religious school – in Ivory Coast. His earliest memories are of begging on the street. -- In the living room of his terraced house with views of the Yorkshire moors, he explains that he did not know he was stateless until researching ways to prevent his deportation following the failure of his asylum claim. With no knowledge of where he was born, or who his parents were, Michel realised he had no legal claim to Ivorian nationality. A UK stateless travel document. A UK stateless travel document. Photograph: Handout Michel’s first application to be recognised as stateless was rejected. After the Liverpool Law Clinic (LLC) stepped in to challenge the decision, he got his first ID – a stateless travel document – in 2014, 15 years after first arriving in the UK. “My life has changed dramatically,” he says. “Before I got my papers, all my thinking was -- Woodhouse, from the LLC, says that as of spring this year, only about 20 of the approximately 700 people who had attempted the procedure since it was introduced had been recognised as stateless. Rather than simply determining that a person is stateless and therefore has a right to protection, the procedure aims to identify any possible country to which the undocumented might be deported. “It’s not really a procedure for helping people who are stateless,” says Pierre Makhlouf, a lawyer with Bail for Immigration Detainees. “It’s actually a procedure to identify those who cannot be removed. The -- establish that you won’t be accepted by another country.” Gábor Gyulai, an expert on statelessness with the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and president of the European Network on Statelessness steering committee, says this additional criterion violates the 1954 statelessness convention. Nonetheless, the UK’s acknowledgment of statelessness represented real progress. “Certainly the UK procedure was a very important step,” says Gyulai. “I remember a few years ago there seemed to be very little appetite to introduce such a procedure.” Yet recognition of statelessness remains fraught with contradictions that are often Kafkaesque. With very few exceptions, statelessness determination procedures put the burden of proof on applicants, who must show that they are not citizens of any country to which they have habitual or family ties. But few embassies will issue documents confirming that someone is not a citizen. The UK government even lists “current passport” among the documents sought to bolster a stateless application. And many such procedures are only open to people who are already legally resident – even though statelessness itself can be a barrier to residency. A Roma woman walks with her children in a camp in Rome. -- authorities. Photograph: Max Rossi/Reuters Italy has one of Europe’s oldest statelessness determination procedures. But Nando Sigona, a sociologist at Birmingham University who has studied statelessness among Italy’s Roma for many years, says he has not heard of a single Roma person being recognised through the country’s official administrative route. “It seems as if in the way the bureaucratic process has been designed they have some idea of the deserving stateless, and those like the Roma don’t fit in and as a result cannot apply – the abject stateless,” Sigona says. Humica has been formally recognised as stateless by the Italian authorities but only managed this through a complex and expensive judicial procedure. Since she got her papers four years ago, she has -- camp. Have you ever seen a Gypsy working alongside Italians?” For Humica, the biggest advantage of being recognised as stateless is that she no longer fears the immigration authorities. Like many undocumented Roma, she has spent time in immigration detention. -- working illegally again, he fills his time volunteering as a cook and support worker for destitute refugees. His only hope is to prove that he is stateless. * * * Latvia also has a statelessness determination procedure. But the country denies that its almost 260,000 non-citizens are stateless. When Latvia became independent in 1990, only those who could trace their family’s presence on the territory to before Soviet occupation in 1940 -- emigrated, or gained Latvian nationality since the government lifted age restrictions on who could be naturalised in the 1990s. But approximately 12% of the Latvian population remain stateless. Although they now have most of the rights of Latvian citizens, they cannot vote and are barred from working in the civil service and some other -- And it’s not just Latvian non-citizens who would rather remain stateless than conform to an identity imposed on them by the state. Antun Blazevic is a stateless Roma actor, playwright and poet who also goes by the stage name of Toni Zingaro – zingaro being the Italian slang for Roma, equivalent to “Gypsy” and generally regarded as a -- Sergei Kruks Sergei Kruks, who was born to Russian parents, is among the 12% of the Latvian population who are stateless. Photograph: Handout The western world doesn’t want to integrate people … They want -- Blazevic – who was once arrested for occupying the Colosseum in Rome in protest at the death of a Tunisian refugee in Italian immigration detention – enjoys his statelessness as identifying him as everything and nothing. He has no plans to apply for Italian citizenship, rejecting the very idea of the nation state that defines who is worthy -- In a few years, Sanaa plans to apply for German nationality, which Siba would benefit from too. But she will have to meet various criteria, including being able to support her family financially. Stateless campaigners argue that Siba’s citizenship should be automatic and her mother should not have to tread carefully to ensure this right. -- As the latest UN report says, there are “straightforward legal and practical measures” that governments should put in place to prevent statelessness and “ensure that children’s very real connections to their countries are recognised through the grant of nationality”. Compared with the legal complexity of recognising and granting rights to stateless adults, protecting children from being born stateless in Europe should be a relatively achievable goal. While some countries have not ratified international treaties to protect the stateless, all EU member states have acceded to the UN convention on the rights of the child, which obliges countries to grant nationality to children who would otherwise be born stateless. Most countries go some way to enshrining these rights in domestic law. But conditions are often attached that are not in line with international treaties – meaning stateless children are only entitled to citizenship if, for example, their parents are legally resident in their country of birth. And in practice, the law is not often implemented. Italy’s citizenship law automatically grants citizenship to stateless children born on its soil, but insists on at least one parent being formally recognised as stateless before the child’s birth. This ignores children who cannot inherit their parents’ nationality, and the many stateless Roma parents who are completely undocumented. But while Roma statelessness is deeply entwined with discrimination, Europe is currently experiencing a rush of goodwill towards Syrian refugees – and children in particular – which could inspire the kind of action on statelessness that has not been forthcoming for the Roma or Russian speakers of the Baltics. -- is still a high level of solidarity throughout Europe,” says Gyulai. “These children are already extremely vulnerable and if they become stateless it will make their situation much worse – especially if there is no mechanism to officially perceive this statelessness and the rights attached to it. This is a test for the mechanisms to prevent statelessness and it’s a good opportunity for states to look at their practice and legislation.” While studies have shown that the risk of statelessness among the children of Syrian refugees is widespread in Turkey and Lebanon, there has been no research into the scale of the problem in Europe. Moreover, the fact that children such as Siba are currently in the asylum system means that their parents will often not realise that they are stateless. But this largely invisible issue could have long-term consequences for them. Acting now to prevent these children of Syrian refugees growing up stateless could head off the problems experienced by other stateless people in Europe. An absence of paperwork might have seemed a minor problem in the midst of the geopolitical upheavals of two decades ago, but it has become a barrier to integration that is harder and harder to solve. Meeting the immediate needs of refugees is one thing, but if governments fail to recognise the long-term impacts of statelessness, a new generation could grow up in limbo.