Ending Statelessness: Interview with Volker Türk
The OSCE and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched the Handbook on Statelessness in the OSCE Areas last month. Volker Türk, Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, UNHCR, tells why preventing and remedying statelessness is high on the joint UNCHR-OSCE agenda.
Why is preventing statelessness important?
Statelessness concerns a basic human right, the right to citizenship. In contrast, for example, to the refugee issue, it is often invisible, forgotten, not really on the radar of governments. Yet it fundamentally affects lives. If you don’t have nationality, you can't travel, for a start. But that is not the most important thing. Sometimes you don’t have access to basic services: healthcare, schools. Just think of how many times in your daily life you have to produce your ID papers. Not only do people not really know about the plight of stateless people, they also often don't know that sometimes it is quite easy to resolve it, with political will and some changes to legislation. UNHCR has been entrusted by the UN General Assembly to protect stateless people, to prevent statelessness and reduce it where it exists. It is part of our core mandate. With our #IBelong campaign we aim to end statelessness by 2024.
How does statelessness arise?
Sometimes, stateless is a gender issue. There are still 26 countries in the world that discriminate on the basis of gender with regard to the way they confer nationality. For example, if a woman marries a foreigner or a stateless person, she cannot in these 26 countries confer her nationality to her children. There have been some harrowing examples of the children then becoming stateless. In the OSCE area, statelessness has often arisen in relation to state succession, the dissolution of what used to be one country – Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, also Czechoslovakia.
If statelessness is often invisible, how can you find out how many people are stateless and reach out to them?
This is one of our biggest issues. We have estimated that about 10 million people are stateless worldwide, but there are only 3.5 million people that we really know about. We need to work with census institutes, with the people that manage documentation registries, and make them aware of the fact that these people exist, because otherwise they may not be registered or documented. So that’s part of the work that we do. Encouraging birth registration in the refugee context is also a huge task. For example, Syrian refugees that are born outside their country, in Lebanon or in Turkey, may well not have a birth certificate. And if that is not fixed, then it is difficult to prove who your parents are. So the issuing of birth certificates is crucial to preventing these problems in the future.
You mentioned that statelessness can be relatively easy to resolve. Are there examples of success in the OSCE area?
Latvia and Estonia have made enormous progress over the years in finding ways, first of all, to enhance the status of non-citizens or people with undetermined nationality. They rightly claim that the status they accord non-citizens is higher than what is foreseen in the 1954 Convention [UN Convention related to the Status of Stateless Persons]. Secondly, they have set up a path to naturalization, which is equally important. But Russia has also done a lot – we see significant a reduction in the Russian Federation in the number of formally stateless people. It is important to point out that these matters affect the personal lives of human beings: they should not become a subject of tensions between states. We encourage states to work on statelessness at the human and technical levels and find the ways and means to deal with it that serve the people best.
Has UNHCR worked together with the OSCE to prevent or remedy statelessness?
We have worked quite closely with the OSCE – with the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM), with the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and with OSCE field operations – in a number of areas. In South-eastern Europe, for example, the OSCE’s HCNM, UNHCR and the European Commission joined forces in 2011 to bring government officials from across the region together for a regional conference on statelessness in Zagreb, producing the Zagreb Declaration, a set of recommendations to eliminate the causes of statelessness. Further regional conferences, for example on durable solutions for displaced persons from Kosovo, and also mapping exercises conducted by UNHCR to assess the need for improvements have led to tangible changes. Serbia, for example, passed legal amendments in 2012 allowing for a simplified procedure to establish the time and place of birth of persons who had been long unsuccessful in meeting complex administrative registration requirements. Montenegro introduced a judicial procedure for late birth registration in 2015.
UNHCR and OSCE have also co-operated in Central Asia, where we have actually seen a lot of success – in Turkmenistan, for example. The establishment of the new republics in Central Asia left thousands of former Soviet Union citizens stateless. Sometimes people didn’t register or didn’t get the proper documentation at the time when the new state issued its nationality laws, and as a result they became stateless. To remedy the situation, it was important, first of all, to engage in dialogue with the government and get their support. In 2009 we co-organized a regional conference in Ashgabat on preventing statelessness. In 2010 the Turkmen government adopted an action plan to eliminate statelessness. Secondly, we reached out to communities, to make sure they knew about the possibility of having their nationality confirmed and how to go about it. This led to around 5,500 stateless persons receiving Turkmen citizenship between 2007 and 2016 and a further 5,500 being naturalized by the end of 2016. I personally attended a ceremony in Ashgabat a few years ago, in which the interior minister handed nationality certificates to formerly stateless people – it was a colourful, joyful event.
How do you expect the OSCE-UNHCR Handbook on Statelessness in the OSCE Area will help to eliminate statelessness?
I think it is great that we could produce this handbook on statelessness together with the two OSCE institutions ODIHR and HCNM. Both them are deeply concerned by the issue. From the HCNM perspective, we know that minority groups are often marginalized and that they can end up in a situation of statelessness as a result. The most glaring example is Roma and Sinti communities in the Western Balkans – but also in Ukraine. This is another important area where our two organizations have been working together. The ODIHR Contact Point on Roma and Sinti Issues hosted an expert seminar together with the Ukrainian government in 2015, on access to identification and civil registration documents by Roma, and UNHCR experts were invited to share good practices. The idea was to help the Ukrainian authorities to gain a deeper understanding of the obstacles Roma face in obtaining civil registration and to identify concrete steps to overcome them.
I hope that the information and good practices presented in the handbook will inspire discussions and encourage further engagements and concrete actions by participating States to eradicate statelessness in the OSCE area. We hope very much that all OSCE participating States will accede to both of the UN Conventions [the 1954 UN Convention related to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness], because that would be the strongest signal, and maybe there could even be a decision by the OSCE to make that point and to support the UNHCR’s global #IBelong campaign, lift it above the fray, not for the politics of it but in the spirit of finding a solution.