East Timor’s tumultuous history of colonisation and military occupation has been accompanied by waves of displacement and relocation of communities. Many of those forcibly relocated have had to adopt a variety of strategies to secure a viable existence in their…
A readership survey form was distributed with FMR31 to all regular readers in all four languages. Each FMR website – English, Arabic, French and Spanish – also had a link to an electronic version of the survey. The total number…
I hail from the Ateker nation, an Itung’a-speaking group, bound by ethno-linguistic ties and practising nomadic pastoralism as our main livelihood activity. The Ateker inhabit the borderland area straddling four countries – Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. They occupy the…
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 our citizenship on a daily basis. For others, citizenship is…
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 persons generally are not recognised as persons before the law…
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 regime; for example, in 1986 the Declaration on the Right…
From 1951, Nepal granted citizenship on the basis of a person’s birthplace and descent. Naturalisation was possible for those who had been resident in the country for at least five years. A decade later, however, the provisions relating to naturalisation…
The people known in Bangladesh as ‘Biharis’ or ‘stranded Pakistanis’ are the Urdu-speaking descendants of Muslims who lived in the different Indian provinces and most of from Bihar and who, at India’s partition in 1947, moved to what became East…
“…it’s a small paper but it actually establishes who you are and gives access to the rights and the privileges, and the obligations, of citizenship.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu, launching Plan’s Universal Birth Registration campaign, February 2005[1] Registration means proof…
In the Dominican Republic, the questions of birth registration and nationality are closely entwined. As is common in Latin America, the rule of jus soli here means that a Dominican birth certificate has become the evidence of nationality for children…