Statelessness


Published: 13 Oct 2016

Although Bulgaria has introduced a new statelessness determination procedure into its national legislation, the high threshold of qualifying criteria will exclude many.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has released a report entitled “The black box of nationality”, which analyses Hungary’s compliance with the international obligations to facilitate refugees’ and stateless persons’ access to naturalisation.

The number of stateless people living in the Netherlands rose from 2,000 in 2012 to 5,000 in 2016. This dramatic increase is primarily accounted for by the number of Syrian-Palestinians within the influx of Syrians fleeing war.

The West African Civil Society Forum has launched a project aimed at reducing the risk of statelessness in Nigeria. Of the ten million stateless people worldwide, 750,000 live in West Africa.

Bidoons, a diverse group of people denied Kuwaiti nationality, encounter practical and legal obstacles to claiming asylum in the United Kingdom. U.K. Home Office country information and guidance for Kuwait makes a distinction between documented and undocumented Bidoons, which determines that the former group are without risk of facing persecution upon return.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has published “Good practices paper – Action 6: Establishing statelessness determination procedures to protect stateless persons,” which provides an overview of good practices in stateless determination procedures among the few states that have established such procedures. Each “Good practices paper” responds to one of the ten actions proposed in UNHCR’s Global action plan to end statelessness: 2014 – 2024.”

Episode 17 of the Global Law at Reading podcast features a presentation given by Professor Hélène Lambert of the University of Westminster, entitled “Arbitrary deprivation of nationality and refugee status.” The presentation examines whether arbitrary deprivation of nationality, either on its own or when taken with other forms of harm, amounts to persecution for the purpose of Article 1A(2) of the Refugee Convention.

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