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Statelessness: A Forgotten Crisis

Statelessness: A Forgotten Crisis

   Mira Siegelberg ▪ Fall 2016
   [1475503817SiegelbergConstantineNuer666.jpg]
   The Nubian community has lived in Kenya for over a hundred years, yet
   many became stateless after Kenya’s independence in 1963. For years,
   Nubian youth had to go through a nationality verification process
   called “vetting” in order to obtain a National ID card, and often had
--
   Nowhere People, 2015, 374 pp.

   Statelessness is a forgotten crisis. At least that is the claim at the
   heart of a recently inaugurated campaign sponsored by the UN High
   Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to draw attention to the estimated
--
   persecution, or the physical disappearance of state territory due to
   climate change. However, according to international agreements
   established in the wake of the Second World War, the term “stateless
   person” applies only to individuals who are not recognized as nationals
   by any state. Refugees, by contrast, are defined in a separate
--
   Until quite recently, the international institutions established to
   manage and care for people who have lost state protection treated the
   legally stateless as a marginal issue. While refugee law has developed
   into a fairly robust area of jurisprudence, statelessness has never
   been the subject of sustained legal study. The UN only embarked on its
   campaign to illuminate the plight of the stateless and lobby for their
   enfranchisement in 2014, the same year the first global forum on
   statelessness in the Netherlands brought together humanitarian
   practitioners and scholars to establish statelessness as its own field
   of research.