The Statelessness & Citizenship Review

Front Matter

Statelessness & Citizenship Review — 2024-08-26

Editorial

Michelle Foster — 2024-08-26

Schrödinger’s Citizenship

Bronwen Manby — 2024-08-26

International law and scholarship lack an agreed vocabulary to refer to the status of people who do not have a recognised citizenship (‘citizenship’ is used here as a synonym for nationality, the term usually used in international law) and yet are also not recognised as stateless. There have been important efforts by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) to clarify and extend the interpretation of the definition of ‘stateless person’. There is, however, a continued lack of settled vocabulary for those who are in ‘stateless-adjacent’ situations, whose status as a national of any particular country or as a stateless person is not (yet) clear. This article considers the use of terminology in two contexts: litigation on behalf of affected people and the collection of statistics about the size of stateless populations. The article emphasises the importance of framing and choice of terminology and proposes a preferred lexicon for use in relation to statelessness, undetermined nationality and risks of statelessness. It puts forward the term ‘presumptive nationality’ to refer to the status of people whose closest connections are to their state of residence but who have no recognised nationality.

Windrush Members’ Encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ and a Deficit of Citizenship

Lia Storey — 2024-08-26

This article is part of a broader, collaborative Oral History project working with members of the Windrush community to explore their experience of the ‘Hostile Environment’ and their own reckoning with a historical injustice, beginning pre-2012. This article focuses on the experience of three Windrush members and their encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime from 2012 onwards, particularly the actualisation of their exclusion from British citizenship as a denial of access to ‘everyday’ citizenship. Citizenship is interpreted from a grassroots level, through the individual’s lens on how their life was uprooted in terms of their livelihood, security, wellbeing and social connection through encounters with the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime. During the data gathering process, a shared understanding of the activist nature of this research was established, creating a space within which participants were asked to reflect on and critique the state’s bordering of British citizenship and the participants’ identification as illegal within this. This article defends an agentive interpretation of citizenship as an experience that is holistically felt and made meaningful, consciously negotiated within state-imposed structures of law, enforcement and entitlement access, and then wielded as a subjectivity whereby individuals claim a more dignified existence. For members of the Windrush Generation who were left de facto stateless due to a lack of sufficient legal identification in the eyes of the state, their deficit of citizenship experience from the margins of British citizenship leaves them well positioned to critique and challenge the entrenched form of citizenship expressed through the ‘Hostile Environment’ regime.This article is part of a broader, collaborative Oral History project working with members of the Windrush community to explore their experience of the ‘Hostile Environment’ and their own reckoning with a historical injustice, beginning pre-2012.

Jus Tribalis

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes — 2024-08-26

Many cases of mass statelessness arise from discrimination against groups. Accordingly, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) and others sometimes pursue group forms of recognition in campaigns to remedy statelessness. In this article, I consider the implications of such an approach by examining its effects in Kenya using the cases of Makonde, Pemba, Shona, Nubian and Galje’el ethnic communities. I argue that securing citizenship is neither purely political and group-based nor purely legal and individual, but rather that these conceptions of citizenship are interdependent, that there are both risks and opportunities in this entanglement and that the management of both requires attention to a cultivated vagueness that characterises the role of ethnic identity in registration and citizenship in Kenya. I conclude with an argument for more vigilance regarding the use of ethnic identity in citizenship bureaucracy and for caution in the export of this group-based campaigning strategy to other national contexts.

The research for this article was funded by the Australian Research Council (IN180100055). I am indebted to many people who provided very thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article, including Bronwen Manby, Mustafa Mahmoud, Wanja Munaita, Keren Weitzberg, Marika Sosnowski, and Dalle Abraham. Thanks also to staff and students at the Peter McMullin Centre for Statelessness at Melbourne Law School, the CERTIZENS project at University of Copenhagen (especially Amanda Hammar), and the CitizenGap project at University of Amsterdam (especially Imke Harbers) who provided useful discussion on presentations of this work. Any remaining shortcomings are my sole responsibility.

Persistent Gaps in Protection

Clara Van Thillo — 2024-08-26

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, beginning in February 2022, millions of Ukrainians have fled their homes. Among the forcibly displaced are stateless persons who lived in Ukraine prior to the war, who are particularly vulnerable because they do not possess any nationality. Unable to prove their identity, stateless internally displaced persons and refugees experience numerous challenges along their flight routes. The measures adopted by European countries to support Ukrainian refugees have been successful in many ways, but insufficiently consider the situation of stateless persons. This article explores the protection gaps in the laws of Ukraine and neighbouring countries, as well as at the European level, and critically evaluates those gaps in light of the relevant international protection regimes, ie, international statelessness law, international refugee law, international and European human rights law and international humanitarian law. From the analysis, it can be concluded that possession of identity documentation and legal status remain crucial conditions for crossing borders and accessing protection.

Artificial Intelligence, Datafication and Exploring the Minimum Content of Nationality

Jason Tucker — 2024-08-26

Participatising Statelessness Research

Raymond Hyma — 2024-08-26

Keeping Statelessness on the Agenda at the Global Refugee Forum and Beyond

Heather Alexander — 2024-08-26

NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs

Hannah Gordon — 2024-08-26

Germany

Helena-Ulrike Marambio — 2024-08-26

Boats in a Storm

Sumedha Choudhury — 2024-08-26

The Fringes of Citizenship

Jyothi Kanics — 2024-08-23

Denationalisation and Its Discontents

Maria Jose Recalde-Vela — 2024-08-26