Communities and individuals affected by armed conflict and violence do not wait for humanitarian actors to analyse and address the problems and threats they face. They permanently monitor their surroundings…
In the upheaval of today’s refugee crisis, European immigration officers can face the particular yet confusing case of stateless people[1] seeking asylum in Europe, with the result that stateless people…
As the first international standards developed for IDPs, the principles were presented to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in April 1998 by the Representative of the Secretary-General on…
Trafficking in persons and migrant smuggling are only two forms of irregular migration; the term ‘trafficking’ describes movements of persons against their will, whereas ‘smuggling’ refers to voluntary movements of…
July 2007, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): A woman has been in labour for three days. The child is obstructed; the mother, in unbearable pain, has been trying to…
A research project on the human smuggling industry and its effects on would-be asylum seekers revealed that of those asylum seekers who crossed a land border into South Africa, a…
Situations of protracted displacement require a shift in mindset from immediate, crisis-based humanitarian action to sustainable service provision – and preferably some degree of local integration. The notion of local…
For many of us, citizenship only really matters when we travel abroad, when the Olympic Games are on, or when we vote in national elections. We do not think about…
In legal terms, being stateless means that no state considers you a national under the operation of its law. The practical implications of this are very serious. For instance, stateless…
For more than twenty years activists have produced declarations that implicitly link statelessness to the challenges of providing human security and promoting dignity, thus bringing it inside the human rights…