WUNRN

http://www.wunrn.com

 

Presentation by Ada Williams Prince, Women's Refugee Commission - http://www.womensrefugeecommission.org/

 

To: NY NGO Committee on Migration, the NGO Committee on the Status of Women and the NGO Committee on the Family.


GENDER ASPECTS OF STATELESSNESS 

I am very happy to be here with you to commemorate International Migrants Day 2009 and bring awareness to these issues. Particularly I’m honored to be on a panel with such distinguished and knowledgeable presenters who are dedicated to The Protection and Empowerment of Stateless Persons.

 

I am here representing The Women's Refugee Commission. For the past 20 years we’ve advocated vigorously for laws, policies and programs to improve the lives and protect the rights of refugee, internally displaced and asylum seeking women, children and young people.

 

I will focus my comments on the specific circumstances of stateless persons who are also refugee women and girls. In particular, I’ll talk about Forced Migrants, Displaced and Refugee Women at risk

 

Statelessness, or the lack of effective nationality, impacts the daily lives of some 11-12 million people around the world. Although the exact numbers are not known, it is estimated that half of these people are women. All displaced women and girls face extreme levels of risk to their safety and well being. This is exacerbated when Women and Girls become stateless.

 

How do women become stateless?

This can be as a result of political change or when states deliberately write laws excluding minority groups from citizenship, such as in the Dominican Republic, Myanmar/Burma, Estonia and Latvia.

 

Gender discrimination is another crucial factor in statelessness. Gender discrimination in nationality means that a woman can lose her right to citizenship by virtue of marriage because she has to denounce her nationality when she gets married. And Women often cannot pass on their citizenship to their children.

 

Other ways of becoming stateless: People may lose access to their birth records and citizenship documents when the state systems linked to registration and citizenship are destroyed during conflict or disasters. Also, families forced to flee their homes and leave their possessions during conflict and natural disasters may leave without identification, or lose proof of citizenship documents, or have them stolen.

 

As a result of being stateless, refugee women and girls are also frequently unable to obtain passports, to travel freely, or acquire jobs in the formal sector. This puts them at risk of using smugglers to remove themselves from difficult situations or in hopes of supporting themselves and their families.

 

But, there are some solutions to these problems. For example, it is important that refugees receive individual ID cards, that women’s names appear on ration cards, and that births, marriages and deaths are registered. This kind of documentation and registration has an impact on refugee return, nationality and inheritance. For example, having an individual identity card can help facilitate movement, stop the use of detention and offer protection against refoulement.

 

Statelessness has innumerable consequences on children, particularly girls.  Those who suffer most are stateless infants, children and youth. Though born and raised in their parents’ country of residence, they lack formal recognition of their existence.

 

First, refugee mothers give birth outside their home countries and in most cases cannot pass on their nationality to their children. Countries that determine citizenship exclusively by the father’s nationality create problems for children born out of wedlock, separated from their fathers, or whose fathers are stateless.

 

Second, Birth registration establishes a child’s legal identity and the state’s responsibility for that child. But without a permanent identity, children have limited access to health care and to primary education; and are almost universally restricted from receiving public secondary education. As a result, many young people are forced to do unskilled labor such as trash picking to survive. Currently 51 million children per year are not registered at birth.  

 

Third, Statelessness may lead to forced or early marriage, harassment, sexual and physical violence, and trafficking. Traffickers of stateless children cannot be taken to court when children are without proper documents that prove their age or resident status.

 

Two specific Examples I’d like to start by talking about Malaysia as an example

In the eyes of the Malaysian government, there is no difference between an undocumented worker and a refugee. As Malaysia has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees have no legal status and no right to work or legal residency.

 

Malaysia is host to a large number of migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers including stateless persons. Concentrated in Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding regions, there are an estimated 100,000 refugees and asylum seekers. This includes two of the most vulnerable stateless populations: Royhinga and those from Myanmar/Burma.

 

These refugee and stateless women face immense challenges. While they desperately need to work, without legal protection and legal status they are extremely vulnerable to violence and exploitation by employers who are able to act with impunity because the women face deportation if they go to the police.

 

Merely leaving the house to go to work puts women at great risk of arrest and attack. Not working at all increases women’s dependency on community members, spouses and neighbors. This also increases their risk of abuse.

 

The complexity of their situation makes it very challenging for UNHCR and other refugee advocates to provide sufficient protection and assistance.

 

Let me give you an example.  One stateless girl from northern Thailand responded to a job offer in a Bangkok and ended up trafficked to Malaysia for commercial sexual exploitation in a brothel. She was eventually rescued, but then she languished for months in a detention center while states argued over where she belonged. Also, children whose migrant parents have been arrested and detained or deported may end up living and working on the street.

 

Let us turn now to Nepal – Bhutanese Refugees

The Himalayan nation hosts about 800,000 people whose nationality is not confirmed and who cannot access important government services without a citizenship certificate.

 

Some key causes of statelessness for Bhutanese in Nepal are being unable to cover the costs of applying for a citizenship certificate, and lack of motivation to apply for citizenship due to low levels of public awareness on the importance of possessing citizenship documents.  In addition, many refugees who fled Bhutan in the early 90’s at the height of the refugee exodus to refugee camps in Nepal claim that their houses and citizenship documents were burned by authorities in Bhutan.

 

Key issues

50% of the Bhutanese refugee population in Nepal is women. There are still a number of key issues that put these stateless and refugee women at risk in refugee camps.

 

Women must get up early and search for firewood both for cooking and for selling as a means of earning a living. As they venture out of the relative safety of the camps to collect firewood they are often attacked along the way, beaten or sexually assaulted.

 

RRefugees in Nepal do not have the right to work. Without the ability to legally earn income, refugee women and girls are more likely to put themselves at risk to make a living in different – and dangerous – ways: Selling their kerosene, collecting firewood as a fuel replacement or by subjecting themselves to exploitation and abuse by working illegally. In addition, this can easily lead to women and children to fall prey to traffickers. Efforts by the international community to prevent and respond to sexual and gender-based violence in the camps remain ongoing.

 

Women are extremely dependent on men, and when abused they have no recourse, or access to resources on their own.

 

25,000 refugees from Bhutan have been resettled in the United States and other receiving countries from camps in eastern Nepal. This is something to celebrate. But for those stateless and refugee women still residing in camps, their situation continues to put them at risk.

 

I’d like to outline some key actions that can be taken now to protect stateless women, children and youth around the world:

 

·        To protect children,  ensure that every child is registered at birth, identify cases of disputed nationality and grant citizenship when a child would otherwise be stateless.

 

·        To protect women, disseminate the new Inter-agency Standing Committee guidelines on fuel strategies (which provide fuel and alternatives and help determine agency roles and responsibilities). This will help stop women from being attacked when they collect firewood, as well as help provide for more effective livelihood interventions.

 

·        To protect women, undertake a series of awareness campaigns to ensure they obtain citizenship certificates or other documentation and support to help anyone who wishes to do so.

 

·        I’ve brought with me today several copies of our Refugee Girls Book, and our report on which you may find interesting.

 

    Refugee Girls - The Invisible Faces of War - 48 pages:

http://www.womenscommission.org/pdf/refugee_girls_book.pdf





================================================================
To contact the list administrator, or to leave the list, send an email to: wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.