5.4

PREVIEW

1. How do you think citizenship laws affect statelessness in Myanmar?
2. How do you think statelessness could be addressed in Myanmar?

In international law, a stateless person is a person who is not recognised as a legal citizen in any country. Many, but not all, stateless persons lack birth certificates and other legal documents that prove that they are legal citizens in a country. De jure statelessness means that a person is not considered a legal citizen under the law of any country. De facto statelessness means that a person is ‘stateless in practice.’ This is based on their lack of access to rights and protection, which other legal citizens otherwise have. This lack of access to rights and protection could be caused by a person’s lack of government documents, if they live in a country where state authorities place importance on people having specific documents in order to access rights and protection. If a person cannot rely on their state to ensure their rights and protection, they are de facto stateless.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has recommended four broad strategies to address statelessness in the world:

1. Identifying stateless groups and underlying reasons that cause statelessness, such as through research and compilation of statistics.

The 2014 Myanmar Housing and Population Census indicated that over one-fourth (27.3 percent) of the total population aged 10 years and older did not have any type of citizenship or identity card on March 29, 2014.

This number might be even higher, as it is assumed that a majority of the 1.2 million individuals who were not surveyed in the census were also de jure or de facto stateless. There are many reasons for the high rate of statelessness in Myanmar, including the rules about legal citizenship in the Burma Citizenship Law of 1982 and structural barriers to accessing legal citizenship.

2. Preventing statelessness by ensuring that national laws on citizenship are in line with international human rights standards, such as by ensuring that they are non-discriminatory.

Civil society organisations in Myanmar have identified several areas of improvement for the Burma Citizenship Law. They recommend that there should only be one category of legal citizenship, such as in the previous Union Citizenship Act of 1948, and that the law should be non-discriminatory. The UN recommends that every child in Myanmar be registered and provided with a Birth Certificate, and that persons with “long -standing ties to Myanmar” be entitled to human rights without any discrimination (JB 2017:50).

3. Reducing statelessness by different actions and programmes, such as by informing stateless individuals of how they could obtain a legal citizenship status.

The Myanmar government has worked to reduce statelessness over the last few years. The Moe Pwint Operation was an outreach project that registered undocumented individuals on Household Lists and issued CSCs to those eligible. Government schools have also been used for processing applications for scrutiny cards. However, civil society actors have said that these initiatives have been discriminatory because they sometimes deny support to members of minority groups and have instead only benefitted members of majority groups (JB 2017:34).

4. Protecting stateless individuals by ensuring access to human rights regardless of their statelessness, until they eventually obtain a legal citizenship status. This could include that countries become State Parties to international treaties on statelessness and that the government and civil society actors provide access to education, healthcare and other services to stateless populations.

Myanmar is not a State Party to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons or the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Myanmar could help address its high rate of statelessness by signing and acceding to these two conventions.

REFLECTION/ DISCUSSION

1. In your opinion, do you think each of the four UNHCR strategies can successfully be applied in Myanmar? Why or why not?
2. What barriers might exist to implementing these strategies? How might these barriers be addressed?
3. How might these strategies be applied?