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One Stateless Child Born Every 10 Minutes: U.N. Report
Discriminatory nationality laws and conflicts like the Syrian civil war mean that one child is born every 10 minutes without an official nationality, according to a new report by the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
The report called for children at risk of statelessness to be granted nationality in the country of their birth and for the reform of laws that presently prevent mothers from passing on nationality to their children on an equal basis as fathers.
The legal Europe.
Children acquire nationality either by being born in a country that grants nationality through birth on their territory or through the transmission of nationality from their parents. However, in countries such as Syria, gender discriminatory nationality laws mean that children can only acquire nationality through their fathers.
The four-year civil conflict in Syria has created more than four million refugees, and the report said that 25 percent of refugee Syrian families have been left fatherless, meaning that a birth certificate is the only means of verifying a child's nationality.
A report by the charity Refugees International in March found that more than 60,000 babies have been born to Syrian refugees in Turkey and are at risk of statelessness, since Turkey does not provide nationality on the basis of a child being born on its soil.
The UNHCR report found that 70,000 stateless children are born each year and that statelessness has a number of negative consequences, including limiting access to education and setting barriers to finding employment. The report found that more than 30 countries require evidence of nationality before offering health treatment and in 20 countries stateless children cannot be legally vaccinated.
The UNHCR has set the target of ending statelessness by 2024. The report, which involved interviews with more than 250 people in seven countries, is to be presented at the U.N. headquarters in New York on Tuesday.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said: "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."
In Europe, major causes of statelessness include the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the break up of Yugoslavia. The UNHCR estimated that there were more than 267,000 stateless people in Latvia and 91,000 in Estonia at the end of 2013. Among members of the European Union, four countries—Cyprus, Estonia, Malta and Poland—are yet to accede to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which offers stateless people a minimum set of human rights including rights to education, employment and accommodation.
Chris Nash, director of the European Network on Statelessness—a civil society alliance with 103 members in 39 countries—says that Europe must lead the way in eradicating the problem. "European states need to be doing a lot more to tighten up their nationality laws," Nash says. "Unfortunately, the reality is that at the moment, many thousands of children even in Europe are being born and growing up stateless."
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