The right to a nationality is recognised as a fundamental human right, and yet the UN estimates that a child is born stateless, somewhere in the world, every 10 minutes. In 2013, more than two hundred thousand people were arbitrarily stripped of their nationality overnight by a Constitutional Court ruling in the Dominican Republic. Children of refugees from Syria face an acute risk of statelessness due to gender discrimination in the Syrian nationality law and deficiencies in the birth registration systems of the countries of exile. The extreme persecution suffered by stateless Rohingya in Myanmar continues to force men, women and children to risk their lives making dangerous journeys in search of a safe haven elsewhere. These are just some of the ways in which statelessness manifests itself as a global human rights challenge – negatively impacting the lives of millions of people, across different regions and contexts.
In this lunchtime seminar, the co-Directors of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion will introduce a discussion of statelessness from a human rights perspective, presenting not only the challenges, but also the opportunities. They will address the nexus between statelessness, legal identity and the recently adopted SDGs; highlight the interaction between statelessness and discrimination, as well as forced displacement; and talk about the role of “inclusion” in their work. They will also present a new set of tools developed by the Institute on the child’s right to a nationality under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including an Analytical Database which can form a model for exploring the content of other international human rights norms.
Tuesday, October 13th, 2015
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
41 East 11th Street, Room 741
New York, NY 10003
