United Nations: Stateless speak up as world misses its '#Ibelong' deadline

London: Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough vividly recalls her terror as a teenager when US immigration officers arrived at her home, ankle-tagged her parents and ordered the family to "self-deport".

The trouble was they had nowhere to go — no country recognised them as nationals.

Two decades on and Ambartsoumian-Clough remains stateless.

Worldwide, millions of stateless people are trapped in a legal limbo. They are often deprived of the most basic rights, exposing them to exploitation, destitution and detention.

On Monday, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) launches a new drive to tackle the crisis, following up its decade-long #Ibelong campaign that had aimed to eradicate statelessness by 2024.

"It's dehumanising, it's isolating and it impacts everything," Ambartsoumian-Clough, 36, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"I couldn't get a job. I couldn't go to college, I couldn't travel. I couldn't even access basic healthcare. And there's always a fear of detention, of disappearing in a system where you just can't get out."

People end up stateless for a host of reasons including migration, flawed citizenship laws and ethnic discrimination. Others fall through the cracks when countries break up.

Ambartsoumian-Clough was born in the former Soviet Union, but her family left just after its chaotic collapse in 1991.

She is not recognised as a citizen by Ukraine, where her mother's family have deep roots, nor by the United States where she has spent most of her life.

No big drop in numbers

Ten years ago, UN chief Antonio Guterres - then head of the UNHCR - launched an ambitious drive to end statelessness within a decade, winning the support of Nobel Laureates and celebrities, including actress Cate Blanchett.

However, the scale of the problem remains little changed.

While more than 565,900 people have acquired citizenship since 2014, this is a small fraction of the global stateless population - and more children are born stateless every year.

But experts are quick to reject any suggestion the #Ibelong campaign has failed.

"It has made a huge difference," said Monika Sandvik, head of the UNHCR's statelessness section, as she reeled off a list of countries taking action.

In 2019, Kyrgyzstan became the first country to end statelessness on its territory and Turkmenistan is expected to announce similar news this week.

Kenya has granted citizenship to long-excluded ethnic groups, the Philippines has launched a national plan to address statelessness, and Colombia has awarded nationality to thousands of children born to Venezuelan migrants.

Thirteen countries have passed laws to ensure no child is born stateless. Others have established mechanisms to identify and protect stateless people on their territory.

A host of nations have also signed the two long-neglected U.N. conventions on statelessness.

Laura Van Waas, co-founder of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, a non-profit based in the Netherlands, said the issue was finally attracting interest at the highest level.

"The 10-year deadline made people listen," she said. "It communicated two very important messages. The first, that it is within our collective power to fix this; the second, that we shouldn't hang about."

But Van Waas echoed UN concerns that rising nationalism and xenophobia could jeopardise efforts to tackle statelessness.

She said little headway had been made for many of the world's largest stateless populations, including more than 1.6 million ethnic Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Hundreds of thousands remain stateless in Ivory Coast and Thailand, even though both countries have made moves to address the issue, while progress has stalled in Dominican Republic.

Discriminatory laws that ban or limit women passing on their nationality to children remain another key stumbling block.

Campaigners are disappointed that only three countries - Sierra Leone, Liberia and Madagascar – have scrapped such laws since 2014; 24 retain restrictions.

Data gaps

When #IBelong launched, the UNHCR estimated there were 10 million stateless people, but it now says there is not enough data to support a reliable estimate.

Data from 95 countries shows 4.4 million people lack a nationality, but many countries thought to have big stateless populations do not provide figures, meaning the real number is significantly higher.

Stateless people interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation over the last decade have compared their plight to being like "a bird that can never land", "a prisoner in my own country", "an alien wherever I go" or "tumbleweed that rolls and rolls, never able to put down roots".

They have described how everyday things like opening a bank account, getting a driving licence, buying a SIM card for a phone or even getting married are frequently impossible.

Sirazul Islam, a Rohingya who lives in Britain, likened it to "being alive, but unable to breathe".

"You are invisible both in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the people who are supposed to be your countrymen and women," he said.

Islam's family are from Myanmar, which passed a citizenship law in 1982 that effectively rendered most Rohingya stateless.

He was born stateless in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, moved to Britain when he was eight and eventually acquired British nationality five years ago.

Islam, 23, now works with the European Network on Statelessness, a civil society alliance, and is training to become a lawyer.

But the cousins he used to play with as a child in Bangladesh have never been to school and remain illiterate.

"I'm living a life they are missing out on," Islam said. "And the only difference is a piece of paper."

In the last decade, groups of stateless people have united to fight for their rights and will play a key role in the Global Alliance to End Statelessness being launched in Geneva.

The alliance will also bring together governments, UN agencies, civil society organisations and the private sector.

Among the most prominent grassroots groups is United Stateless, which Ambartsoumian-Clough co-founded in 2017.

United Stateless is pushing for Congress to open a path to citizenship for stateless people living in the United States.

One 2020 study estimated more than 200,000 people could be stateless in the country.

"For a long time we've been silent," said Ambartsoumian-Clough. "But things are changing. We don't want pity. We want countries to change their laws so that we can move on with our lives."

But Ambartsoumian-Clough will not be in Geneva.

"I'm still stateless," she said. "I don't have a passport."