By – Tarinee

Abstract

Citizenship provides the legal foundation of identity, rights, and recognition in international law. Yet, across the world, millions are stateless, not as a result of a lack of homeland, but rather because they experience the consequences of the legal system misapplied to their nationality. This article seeks to highlight how international law is inconsistently implemented within the idea of statelessness, which will be examined through the cases of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Dominicans of Haitian descent, and the Palestinians. This article also highlights how states manipulate citizenship to discriminate against ethnic or political minorities in a political atmosphere where international law is no longer consistently enforced. The available legal norms are anti-statelessness and anti-arbitrary deprivation of nationality; however, enforcement remains weak and politically influenced. In conclusion, this article highlights the profound concern that international law does not operate with a nominal or rhetorical commitment to accountability in how stateless persons are legally recognised and how citizenship can be weaponised.

Introduction

Citizenship means more than a passport — it’s a source of legal protections, civil rights, and a form of national belonging. It helps determine whether an individual belongs to a state and thus has access to the legal protections associated with being a citizen, or if they stand in a legal limbo, off-the-record, unacknowledged by bureaucratic systems. While international law stipulates nationality as a basic human right, with legal protections articulated in important instruments including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, millions of people around the world are stateless – not just by chance but by choice.

Statelessness emerges from a tangled web of conflict, discrimination, colonization and administrative artefacts. At the core of this is a selective application of international law, where countries adhere to their legal responsibilities toward some but blatantly violate the same laws for others. Statelessness becomes more than just a legal obligation – it emerges from systems of exclusion and structural violence.

The Rohingya: Legal Erasure of an Ethnic Minority

The statelessness of the Rohingya illustrates how citizenship can be deliberately withheld to marginalize entire ethnic groups. Despite living in Myanmar for generations, the Rohingya—a Muslim minority in Rakhine State—have faced decades of exclusion and violence, and are denied recognition under the 1982 Citizenship Law, which excludes them from the country’s officially recognized “national races.”The law instituted an ethnic-based tiered system of citizenship; The Rohingya were denied citizenship by stipulating proof of lineage back to 1823, an almost impossible task given the historical neglect of birth registration and political avoidance of claims of Rohingya identity. 

The Rohingya are labelled “foreign residents” or “Bengalis, which is used to falsely suggest that they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They are thus denied access to basic rights. Their common experience of legal invisibility means they are prone to arbitrary arrest, forced labour, extortion, and disenfranchisement. Their situation deteriorated even further in 2017 as the Myanmar military launched a horrific crackdown in Rakhine State, leading to more than 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh. The United Nations has claimed that the military’s actions constitute “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and later, via an independent fact-finding mission, genocide.

The international response to Myanmar’s acts of persecution against the Rohingya peoples – despite significant levels of international condemnation – remains largely symbolic. Myanmar is not a party to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, but Myanmar is still bound by customary international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, it is clear, they can control how any of those norms are enforced. Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law continues to deny citizenship and basic rights to Rohingya, leaving them with no citizenship status. Regional actors, such as Bangladesh, countries with camps like Kutupalong, housing over a million refugees, reject permanent integration and focus solely on repatriation, ignoring persecution risks. Despite ICJ and ICC efforts, little has changed. The Rohingya remain in camps without legal identity, citizenship, or a path to safe return.

Dominicans of Haitian Descent: Statelessness through Legal Retrospection

The case of Dominicans of Haitian descent shows how citizenship status can be taken away, not just through discriminatory laws but also by a retroactive interpretation of constitutional rights. In 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic issued Judgment TC/0168/13, the ruling retroactively stripped citizenship from those born to undocumented foreign nationals, redefining “in transit” to include anyone without legal residency. This affected individuals born as far back as 1929, mostly descendants of Haitian migrants. As a result, about 200,000 people of Haitian descent were left at risk of statelessness. The decision undermined birthright citizenship, denying thousands identity documents, education, and healthcare. Even children like Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico, born and raised in the Dominican Republic, were arbitrarily stripped of nationality. In the 2005 Yean and Bosico case, the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights ruled that not issuing birth certificates to these girls was a violation of their rights to nationality, education, equal protection, and legal personality under the American Convention on Human Rights.

Regardless of this existing legality, the 2013 court decision revoked prior decorum and seriously undermined the jurisdiction of the Inter‐American Court. The Dominican state argued that the regional mandate could not align with its own national jurisdiction, creating additional obstacles to ensure compliance with human rights decisions. Although the 2014 Law 169‐14 introduced a process for nationality—dividing individuals into Group A (registered at birth) and Group B (requiring naturalization)—only a limited number could regularize their status. Bureaucratic obstacles and heavy documentation requirements left many without legal status, while others faced expulsion or remained at risk of it.

According to recent estimates, there are around 130,000 individuals who remain stateless by virtue of Judgement TC/0168/13 – they are also unable to claim citizenship in either Haiti or the Dominican Republic, even though they were born and have lived in the Dominican Republic. 

Palestinians: Statelessness Frozen by Occupation and Legal Limbo

Since the 1948 Nakba (the term used to describe the events surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948, where Palestinians fled or were expelled), Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and neighbouring states like Jordan and Lebanon have lived in prolonged statelessness, denied citizenship despite large populations and multi-generational claims to identity. In 1948, an estimated 700,000-800,000 Palestinians were displaced from historic Palestine and then over 1 million displaced in 1967. Despite UNGA Resolution 194 and Article 13 of the UDHR affirming Palestinians’ right of return, their claims have been consistently denied and left unenforced. In countries like Lebanon and Egypt, Palestinians face entrenched legal discrimination—children of Palestinian refugee fathers often cannot be registered or granted birth nationality, leaving them stateless and denied basic rights like education, healthcare, and legal identity.

Palestinians living in Lebanon and Egypt are faced with established legal discrimination: children born to refugee fathers are not registered or made nationals, as a result, they miss out on basic entitlements, like education, health care, and legal identity. Jordan’s policies mean that around 200,000 Gazan-origin refugees in the Jerash camp live without nationality, citizenship, or political rights. Many lost Jordanian citizenship after the 1988 West Bank disengagement, with Israeli policies further deepening their exclusion. Palestinians in East Jerusalem hold only permanent residency—revocable at any time, while many Palestinians in Israel face legal precarity, especially amid efforts to revoke status over political expression.

Although the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion deemed Israel’s occupation and settlement policies illegal under international law and the ICERD, international mechanisms have still failed to secure citizenship, protection, or rights for stateless Palestinians. Citizenship in this respect becomes both withheld and weaponized – whereby whole communities become legally invisible and systematically excluded from the ability to participate, to be mobile, and to be protected.

Conclusion

International law professes a universality, the rights to nationality, non-discrimination and the right to legal identity are directly stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ICCPR, and 1954 & 1961 Statelessness Conventions. Yet for millions like the Palestinians, Rohingyas, Dominicans of Haitian descent, these rights are ideals for which to strive, that remain unreachable. 

Article 15 of the UDHR guarantees the right to nationality, but for the stateless, exclusionary citizenship laws, purposely wielded by states to create an illusion of this guarantee. The selective and selective application of international law that is driven by political will and the protection of state sovereignty allows states to carry-out mass denationalisation without any repercussions.

The human toll is striking: stateless persons cannot attend health care services, they cannot attend school, they cannot work to support themselves, they can own nothing, and they suffer from an inability to place any reasonable restrictions on movement. To start with, stateless persons lack the fundamental civil and political rights to marry, inherit, or transmit nationality. What the stateless live is not an absence of right, but rather an erasure of identity, dignity, and belonging. 

This cannot be the status quo. The international community must close the gap between promise and practice — ensuring that rights embedded in some legal system are rights enjoyed in life. Statelessness is not a fate; it is a human injustice and, like all injustice, it is both built and can be broken down.

About the Author

Tarinee is a third-year law student who thrives at the intersection of law, history, and global affairs. She is an editor for Nickled and Dimed in the International Relations cluster and has experience in legal research, writing, and advocacy.

Image Source : https://www.vaticannews.va/en/world/news/2018-11/unhcr-appeal-eliminate-statelessness-grandi.html