Statelessness in the 21st Century: Legal Gaps and Human Costs

Author: Sibghat Sheikh

November 25, 2025

Rohingya refugees hold placards at the Kutupalong camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, to mark the fifth anniversary of their flight from neighbouring Myanmar to escape a 2017 military crackdown, on 25 August 2022. [Image credit: Rafiqur Rahman/REUTERS]

1. Introduction

Nationality in any legal system marks the boundary between inclusion and exclusion. It decides who has a voice, who receives protection, and who is recognized. For tens of millions, this boundary has been deliberately set to exclude them. Their situation is not accidental. Statelessness frequently results from intentional legal decisions made through legislation, reinterpreted by courts, or maintained through bureaucratic neglect. This highlights a major contradiction in international law: while the right to nationality is frequently and clearly affirmed, the mechanisms to uphold it are often weak, fragmented, or entirely absent.

The international order that emerged after the Second World War tried to put nationality into a universal form. The Right to a nationality, by Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR 1948) states that all people are entitled to a nationality. The Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons of 1954, and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness of 1961 attempted to translate that principle into a legal framework that would safeguard the rights of stateless people. They were also aimed at averting future instances of statelessness by having definite nationality protection and state responsibilities. The determining factor is, nevertheless, sovereignty. States continue to make, to deprive, or to take away nationality in a way that is often criticized and seldom reversed by international law. It is this discrepancy between the ideal and real institutional power that has enabled statelessness to continue not as an accidental oversight but as a form of legal and stable condition.

This article presents three case studies (the Dominican Republic, the Palestinian situation, and Myanmar-Bangladesh) to discuss this gap. Even though the cases in question are related to different legal systems and histories, they all demonstrate a similar trend: states develop or perpetuate statelessness in a number of legal ways. In the meantime, international law provides some recognition but does not provide a means of enforcement. The article then looks at the structural aspects of the international regime that enable this gap to persist. It then suggests changes that are required to address this gap. The main argument is that statelessness in the contemporary world is not merely a result of a lack of laws but also a direct result of a deliberate weak enforcement mechanism. This problem requires a more robust legal framework, but not only in the form of legislation.

2. Normative Framework and Legal Gaps

The modern statutory law, as far as statelessness is concerned, is held in a very complicated and, in many cases, a strained environment. It tries to balance the universal ambitions of the post-war human rights systems and the sovereignty of states to decide the terms of nationality and citizenship. The conflict was embodied in Article 15 of the UDHR, which made the claim that all people have a right to nationality and that this right cannot be arbitrarily deprived. The provision was a reaction to a time of moral rebalancing after the Second World War, when the mass denationalization and displacement demonstrated nationality to be the key to receiving other rights. Nonetheless, this significant statement has not been furthered by a system of enforcement: the UDHR is declarative, not legally binding; no international court has the power to force a state to grant or restore nationality on the basis of Article 15 only. In this way, the right to nationality is presented as a universal entitlement, yet it remains in principle unfulfilled, highlighting an ongoing epistemic tension between the right itself and the available remedial measures that have yet to be fully addressed.

In order to bridge this gap, two more specialized conventions were adopted, namely The Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (1954) and The Convention on Reduction of Statelessness (1961). The first legal definition of a stateless person appeared in the 1954 Convention and comprised “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law” and gave civil, economic, and social rights that state parties are to guarantee to such persons. It was a change of doctrine: rather than affirming nationality as a right, it acknowledged stateless people as subjects who require international protection. Nevertheless, the level of protection remains limited. The treaty does not require states to grant nationality, instead focusing on treatment standards during statelessness. Many obligations are hard to enforce due to the lack of a dedicated supervisory authority, leaving implementation largely to domestic legal systems. Article 34 of the 1954 Convention includes a clause allowing disputes to be referred to the ICJ between states, but there is no ongoing supervisory body or mechanism for individual petitions. Additionally, many obligations are non-self-executing, meaning the treaty is inactive without corresponding domestic laws, such as procedures for determining statelessness. Its definitional scope is also narrow, recognizing only de jure statelessness and excluding individuals who, although formally nationals of a state, cannot effectively access its protection- a category of great practical importance. 

The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness attempted to address the issue at the source, ensuring that statelessness did not occur in the first place. It requires states to confer nationality on any child born on their soil who would otherwise be stateless (Article 1) and limits the extent to which nationality can be deprived (which would result in the statelessness of a person) (Articles 8-9). It deals with foundling, statelessness as a result of state succession and certain gendered problems of transmission. These protective measures theoretically should have greatly reduced the number of stateless people in the world over the years. Practically, the Convention has faced poor ratification - as of 2025, only 78 states are party to the Convention, which accounts for less than half of the international community. The normative power of the treaty has been undermined by many states entering into reservations or not enacting it into domestic law. More importantly, as was the case with the 1954 Convention, the 1961 Convention does not include an independent monitoring body; adherence is left to political goodwill and soft oversight of UNHCR, which does not entail coercive force. This institutional weakness has enabled the states to preserve nationality laws that are retroactive, discriminatory, or immune to the risk of statelessness.

When combined, there is a structural asymmetry. On the one hand, there is a body of universal norms that expresses the right to nationality and stipulates protection against statelessness. Conversely, the sovereign prerogative, which has long been a part of the law of membership, faces no meaningful international enforcement. There is no standing committee, individual petition mechanism, or regular review procedure of the statelessness regime as opposed to the human rights treaties that have periodic reporting and quasi-judicial organs. It is additionally compounded by the fact that many obligations are not self-executing, and therefore, such ratifying states can still be technically non-compliant in cases where domestic law fails to bring the treaties to life. 

3. Case Study I — Myanmar–Bangladesh (Rohingya)

The Rohingya case reveals a high degree of normative asymmetry: a nationless people, as in Myanmar, and a displaced or refugee population in Bangladesh. The origins of the issue lie in Myanmar's Citizenship Law of 1982, which defines citizenship as belonging to one of the officially recognized national races and having family origin in the country that dates back to 1824. This law has served to deny the Rohingya people their identity and their citizenship. Instead, the law creates membership on grounds of lineage as opposed to equal protection, making ethnicity regulate legal identity. The legislation has effectively rendered a long-settled Rohingya population in Rakhine State officially stateless, depriving them of citizenship rights and consequently of access to travel, education, employment, and the legal recognition of family life—such as marriage registration, birth certification, and the right to live with or reunite with relatives.

Consequently, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar reported that there were systematic atrocities against the Rohingya, including murder, rape, and the burning of villages. These measures took place within the context of their non-recognition as citizens and institutionalized segregation after the violent riots of 2012 in the Narzi quarter. When the right to nationality can be viewed as the right to possess rights, the Myanmar legal system undermines the possibility of holding rights. It renders them recognizable to the state only as Bengali, making them deportable or controllable. This is where the law comes in as a dispossession rather than a remedy.

On the other side of the Naf River, humanitarian admission without legal integration has become the strategy of Bangladesh. It has redefined Rohingya as Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN) instead of refugees. Since Bangladesh is neither a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention nor any of the statelessness conventions of 1954/1961, it therefore lacks a specific refugee statute. This has caused more than one million Rohingya to live in 33 overcrowded camps in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char, and only 1.13 million had been registered by April 2025. The fact that populations are being categorized as FDMN shows that they are being taken care of but not called refugees so that the host country does not bear the legal obligations that refugee status would present under international law, including non-refoulement obligations, employment and education opportunities, and possible avenues of eventual permanent resettlement.

The aspect of intergenerational nationality transfer is acute. The Bangladeshi system of citizenship is descent-based (not jus soli), and the government has not only denied Rohingya children access to local education but also denied them access to Bangladeshi documentation, leaving camp-based schooling as the only legitimate means to formal education, which is precarious, non-certificated, and can be suspended without notice. Bangladesh is bound by Article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) that ensures every child is registered at birth and has a right to a nationality. However, the Rohingya have long been administratively segregated in the camps out of the national civil registry (a bureaucratic device that maintains a de facto statelessness).

The Myanmar-Bangladesh corridor can serve as an example of two different forms of juridical containment. The Rohingya are stateless in Myanmar by default because of the 1982 Law that effectively denationalizes them. By contrast, the FDMN framework in Bangladesh acknowledges the Rohingya, but does not give them rights, which places them in a legal vacuum where, although they cannot be deported, they still do not have legal status, which would promote permanent solutions. This gives rise to a situation in which the political environment is usually stagnant when it comes to repatriation efforts, moving in circles of promises and impasse. The population in question is stuck in place, not because there is no way out, but because of a cultivation of strategic uncertainty.

4. Case Study II — Dominican Republic

Where Myanmar is a case of denationalization by definition, the Dominican Republic is the case of denationalization by adjudication. On 23 September 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Court passed Judgment TC 168-13 that held that individuals born in the Dominican Republic to parents who had not been given regular migration status, predominantly of Haitian origin, did not have Dominican nationality, even if they had lived their whole lives as Dominican citizens. The ruling was retroactive, and thousands of people were deprived of citizenship. The court defined nationality as an inherited rather than a territorial right and redefined the in-transit exception in the Constitution to apply its implications to generations of Haitian-origin inhabitants. This retroactivity did not happen by chance - it was a legal device. The decision of the court was brought out as a statement of historical fact, and it stated that people were not being deprived of their nationality, but rather their real status was being exposed, that they were not citizens at all. It is one of jurisprudence, making the lived citizenship a legal error.

Protestors took to the streets of Miami to decry a Dominican ruling that leaves hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian ancestry stateless, July 1, 2015. [Image credit: Nadege Green/WLRN]

The decision is directly incompatible with the 2005 decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic, which held that depriving children born on Dominican soil of their nationality just because their parents were of irregular status violated the provisions of Article 20 of the American Convention on Human Rights. Consequently, the Court obliged the Dominican state to provide birth certificates and change practices that resulted in de facto statelessness. However, eight years later, TC 168-13 not only disregarded that jurisprudence but entrenched the complete opposite stance in constitutional law. It is not merely a case of a country neglecting to take into account its own laws, but a legal battle between the constitutional court of a country and the International Human Rights Court. The case demonstrates that international courts are not able to override sovereign states when a particular country decides to impose its constitution and authority over international law. The Inter-American system is reliant on good faith and political will, something that it lacks in this instance.

In May 2014, in response to this, the Dominican government passed Law 169-14, which was supposed to reestablish nationality to those already in the civil registry and to provide a regularization route to others. However, it was implemented in a limited and bureaucratic way. Thousands were left in limbo, especially people who were never registered at birth or could not generate documentation, and continued to be stateless despite the rhetoric of the law. This drew strong criticism from International bodies, yet they could not legally do anything to oblige the country to rectify its actions. The Organization of American States (OAS) issued reports, and the UNHCR urged corrective measures, but no one could legally make the country amend its actions. The legal issue in this case is not the absence of rules but the institutional one: the right to nationality of individuals born within a state is not a secret in international law; the problem is that there is no global institution or mechanism to compel the constitutional court of a particular country to overturn its own decisions regarding citizenship legislation. These are the legal limits of what passes through the courtroom.

5. Case Study III — Palestinians

Palestinian statelessness is both historical and structural: produced by mass displacement in 1948 and 1967, then reproduced by a jurisdictional architecture that fragments protection across host states and UN mandates. Today, some 5.9 million Palestinian refugees are registered with UNRWA, the agency created to assist them in the Levant; registration is not nationality, and for most, no naturalization pathway exists in host countries. The doctrinal hinge is Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the “UNRWA clause” which excludes from the Convention those currently receiving UNRWA assistance, but provides that when such assistance ceases, they are ipso facto entitled to Convention benefits, a provision whose interpretive elasticity has long been contested. The central political reference point is UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 1948, which called for the return of refugees to their homes or compensation for their losses. However, this provision has remained more of a moral and political aspiration than an enforceable legal remedy.

Host-state regimes translate that structure into lived precarity. Jordan, unique in the region, extended citizenship widely after 1948/1950, but post-1988 “disengagement” and subsequent practices saw thousands of Palestinians stripped of Jordanian nationality, often arbitrarily. It produced a class of people who had been citizens and then became paperless again. The Palestinian population in Lebanon is also systematically deprived of citizenship, with most jobs requiring work permits, and various regulated occupations being restricted by the 2001 Law 296/2001. Law 296/2001 prohibits non-citizens, including Palestinian refugees, from owning or inheriting property in Lebanon, thereby entrenching their economic and social exclusion. Many Palestinian families continue to rely on the services offered by UNRWA. Historically, Syria extended to Palestinians almost equal socio-economic rights, albeit without formal nationality. The civil war destroyed this model: Yarmouk, which was previously called the capital of the diaspora, was deserted and ruined. Return after the conflict has been slow, conditional, and precarious. Furthermore, the question arises - what does it mean to return to a country that no longer functions as a unified or reliable state?

The division of mandate between UNRWA and UNHCR is usually misconstrued. Under Article 1D, Palestinians within the territories of UNRWA (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, Gaza) are not covered by the Convention on refugees. Yet, outside of those territories, or where no UNRWA assistance is offered, they are to be covered automatically. There has been an inconsistency between jurisprudence and practice: national authorities and certain courts have been extremely restrictive in the interpretation of Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention. They believe that Palestinians are a special group whose protection is postponed on political grounds. This leads to a mismatch in standards: an international rule calls for a smooth transfer of protection, but national legal systems are unwilling to make it happen.

Lebanon exemplifies this asymmetry in practice. UNRWA estimates that several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees are registered in the country. Poverty levels among this population remain exceptionally high, while access to employment is structurally restricted. Although limited labor reforms since 2005 have expanded eligibility for work permits, many regulated professions, such as medicine, law, and engineering, remain effectively closed to Palestinians or are subject to prohibitive collateral conditions. Property restrictions under Law 296/2001 compound exclusion; funding crises at UNRWA periodically threaten the minimal safety net that substitutes for citizenship.

What follows is not a doctrinal tidy-up but an ethical proposition: if nationality is the condition for having rights, then leaving millions in a status that is neither refugee under the Convention nor citizen of a state is not an administrative oversight; it is a jurisprudential choice. Article 1D offers a textual bridge; Resolution 194 offers a political one. Until host-state laws recalibrate access to work, property, and civil registration, and until receiving states outside UNRWA areas apply the ipso facto clause as designed, Palestinian statelessness will remain a paradigm of how international law can acknowledge a problem and yet keep it in suspension.

6. Cross-Case Analysis: Patterns of Legal Gaps and Institutional Limits

Across Myanmar, the Dominican Republic, and the Palestinian contexts, three distinct state strategies emerge, each exploiting different legal architectures to produce or sustain statelessness. Myanmar uses legislation and ethnic categorization (the 1982 Citizenship Law) to exclude an entire group at the definitional stage. The Dominican Republic uses judicial reinterpretation, which retroactively redefines citizenship as a historical error, enabling it to justify its actions (TC 168-13). The case of the Palestinians is one of jurisdictional fragmentations, whereby a legally established group of people is maintained in a state of non-membership. This is enabled through mandate division and host-state restrictions. While these approaches may differ in their methods, they all achieve the same result: they turn statelessness from an unintended error into a purposeful legal tool.

The second pattern concerns the weakness of international legal enforcement. In all three cases, the issue was not the absence of legal norms or international standards, but rather the lack of mechanisms to ensure their implementation. The Rohingya were stripped of citizenship in defiance of Article 15 UDHR and the preventive logic of the 1961 Convention. The Dominican Tribunal acted eight years after Yean and Bosico, in open disregard of binding Inter-American jurisprudence. Palestinians fall through the gap not because Article 1D lacks clarity, but because states and courts choose not to apply the ipso facto protection clause as designed. In each case, international law articulates the right but cannot enforce it: the 1954/1961 statelessness conventions have no supervisory committees, Inter-American Court judgments depend on domestic compliance, and Article 1D relies on administrative implementation rather than adjudicatory triggers. The result is a jurisprudential vacuum in which rights are declared but not delivered.

A third recurring feature is intergenerational transmission. In Myanmar, children born to stateless parents inherit exclusion, as access to nationality depends on taingyintha lineage, not territorial birth. In Bangladesh, FDMN children encounter legal non-existence at birth due to exclusion from the civil registry, despite CRC Article 7. The Dominican Republic considers people born after the constitutional amendment and those whose parents had not obtained the necessary documentation in the same way, and therefore continues to perpetuate statelessness through generations. Palestinian children born in Lebanon face legal restrictions in employment, acquisition of property, and civil registration. Such statelessness is not a fixed state itself, but rather a recurring system that is transmitted not by individuals but by how the legal landscape works.

These are just some of the ways the political and economic factors can create gaps in the law. Statelessness does not exist due to the inability of states to eradicate it; it is often just a means to certain political ends. In Myanmar, it enhances a majority group; in the Dominican Republic, it assists in the national identity; and in the Palestinian case, a state of deliberate indecision. This deliberate indecision functions as a political strategy, maintaining the population in a state of legal suspension that avoids both full integration and formal exclusion. Host states preserve ambiguity to prevent the naturalization of Palestinians, which they fear might weaken claims to return, while international institutions sustain parallel mandates that perpetuate temporary protection. The international law thus depends on the soft law, which has no power to force states to change their internal policy. This reveals the core issue: statelessness is more than a legal problem that needs a simple fix. It results from intentional choices in institutional design, and international law currently lacks the authority to challenge these choices.

7. Toward Closing the Legal Gaps — Institutional and Doctrinal Reforms

The preceding case studies reveal not a lack of legal norms but a crisis of implementation and institutional design. Any attempt to close these gaps must therefore move along two axes simultaneously: strengthening institutional enforcement and clarifying doctrinal ambiguities that states exploit.

1. Reinvigorating Treaty Supervision and Enforcement

The 1954 and 1961 Statelessness conventions, though normative, are structurally weak. They do not have any treaty bodies, periodic reporting, or individual petition procedures as compared to core human rights treaties. The first, and perhaps the most feasible, reform would be the establishment of a special supervisory mechanism under the auspices of the UNHCR or a new Optional Protocol, similar to the periodic review of the Human Rights Committee. As a result, such frameworks would become operational regimes with regular state reporting, individual communication, and follow-up procedures. This does not involve reopening the treaties; the General Assembly can direct UNHCR to make systematic reviews and give findings similar to the Universal Periodic Review. This compromise would not address the primacy of sovereignty, but it would create institutional resistance to non-compliance.

2. Closing Doctrinal Loopholes

The ambiguities in doctrines perpetuate statelessness. In the Inter-American system, TC 168-13 established that local courts could use interpretations of constitutional text to overrule prior human rights rulings. A reform agenda would be to make follow-up mechanisms stronger under the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court, e.g., mandatory compliance hearings or referral of the states that disobey a judgment to the General Assembly of the OAS. Likewise, authoritative UNHCR guidance or General Assembly resolutions clarifying Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention would help put an end to decades of national jurisprudence over ipso facto inclusion. Such an interpretation codified by domestic asylum law would seal one of the longest-standing gaps for Palestinians in third states.

3. Integrating Statelessness Prevention into Nationality Law Reform

Reforms at the national level should entrench statelessness prevention in nationality laws. The necessary changes include ensuring that children who would otherwise be stateless are granted nationality by birth, as required by the 1961 Convention (Article 1). It also means removing discriminatory and retroactive laws, such as those found in Myanmar and the Dominican Republic. Incentives, technical support, and peer review could also be used to encourage states to implement statelessness determination procedures (SDPs) that are consistent with the 2014 Guidelines of UNHCR to ensure orderly identification and protection. The application of SDPs to domestic administrative law would turn a soft humanitarian framework into a rights-based framework.

4. Mobilizing Regional Mechanisms

In the absence of global mechanisms, regional mechanisms may serve as intermediate enforcers. The Inter-American Court already possesses binding jurisdiction; its judgments can be given more authoritative force with systematic political follow-up by the OAS General Assembly. The African human rights system provides another useful example. Even though fewer African countries have ratified statelessness treaties, the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child has made important rulings on nationality and birth registration. These decisions have been influential despite the Committee lacking the power to force compliance. The same practice by the CRC Committee via General Comments and Concluding Observations can utilize Article 7's birth registration norm to pressure states such as Bangladesh and Lebanon. 

5. Reframing Statelessness as a Core Human Rights Concern

Sealing the legal loopholes surrounding statelessness would necessitate a change in the perception of the matter. It is commonly assumed to be a technical issue or a humanitarian matter, and this has continued to push it to the periphery of mainstream human rights monitoring. It is this framing that has enabled the states to escape the prolonged examination of their nationality laws and practices. To transform that, statelessness should be incorporated in the mainstream international review processes like the Universal Periodic Review, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), CRC, and the Human Rights Committee. The inclusion of these indicators would make it possible to monitor them on a regular basis and would leave the burden of justification to the states themselves. Instead of leaving stateless people to oppose the exclusionary policies individually, governments would be asked to publicly explain the mechanisms that create and sustain statelessness.

8. Conclusion

Statelessness in the modern day is not due to the absence of the law norms; it is simply the consequence of a failed legal structure. Article 15 of the UDHR is further elaborated as a right of nationality, which is supported by the 1954 and 1961 Conventions, and is reflected in regional and international case law. However, in states such as Myanmar, the Dominican Republic, and for the Palestinian people, these principles come to a dead end: sovereignty, divided jurisdictions, and courts that bend the rights beyond their grasp. The right to belong may be declared by international law, but it provides no effective means of enforcing it. The resultant legal vacuum does not just allow statelessness to persist but also helps entrench it.

The commonality in all these cases is that they expose the institutional flaws of international law. In spite of the normative clarity, statelessness still remains. In Myanmar, the Rohingya are stateless because of a local law, but Palestinians are in between competing jurisdictions. On the same note, Dominican-born citizens of Haitian origin lack nationality courtesy of judicial reasoning. Denationalization of people is not a technical issue or an accident. It is a legal policy and political tool that exploits the loopholes in the application of the international legal environment.

Reform does not just entail reforming the international institutions; it also entails introducing clarity in the doctrines. A strategy that comprises the establishment of supervisory bodies, clarification of Article 1D, and reinforcement of national legislation on nationality may begin to close the gaps. Institutional reform is not sufficient, however, there needs to be a shift in the theoretical understanding of statelessness: it must not only be seen as a human rights issue, but one that is also linked to the issue of sovereignty, identity, and belonging. The fact that there are no effective mechanisms of enforcement of international law implies that stateless individuals enjoy rights on paper, but with no real means of exercising or protecting them. They are in a legal limbo where they are recognized by the law but left without any practical safeguards.

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Glossary

• 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless PersonsThe primary international treaty defining who qualifies as a stateless person and setting minimum standards for their treatment by states.

• 1961 Convention on the Reduction of StatelessnessThe treaty obliges states to prevent statelessness, especially at birth and in cases of loss or deprivation of nationality, through safeguards and procedural guarantees.

• ACERWC (African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child)An African Union body that monitors the implementation of the African Children’s Charter. It has issued key decisions on birth registration and nationality, including Nubian Children v. Kenya (2011).

• American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR)A regional human rights treaty was adopted in 1969. Article 20 protects the right to nationality and was central to the Inter-American Court’s reasoning in Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic.

• Article 1D (1951 Refugee Convention)A special provision excluding Palestinians receiving UNRWA assistance from the Refugee Convention’s scope, but granting ipso facto inclusion when such assistance ceases. Its inconsistent interpretation has created significant protection gaps.

• Article 15 (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)Declares that everyone has the right to a nationality and prohibits arbitrary deprivation of nationality. It is declaratory and lacks enforcement mechanisms.

• Bhasan CharA remote island in the Bay of Bengal, where Bangladesh has relocated thousands of Rohingya refugees. Its isolated location and restricted mobility regime have raised concerns about rights protections and voluntariness of transfers.

• CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women)An international treaty adopted in 1979 that defines discrimination against women and sets out state obligations to eliminate it. It has been used to scrutinize gendered aspects of nationality laws.

• CRC Article 7 (Convention on the Rights of the Child)Recognizes every child’s right to birth registration and to acquire a nationality. Frequently invoked to challenge intergenerational statelessness.

• Denationalization

• The process by which a state withdraws or revokes the nationality of an individual or group, rendering them non-citizens. It can occur through legislation, administrative acts, or judicial decisions and is often used as a political tool to exclude minorities or dissenting populations. In international law, arbitrary or discriminatory denationalization constitutes a violation of the right to nationality under Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• DispossessionThe act of depriving individuals or communities of property, rights, or status, often through legal or administrative mechanisms. It extends beyond physical displacement to include the stripping of citizenship or legal identity.

• Epistemic TensionA conflict between what is known or claimed to be known and the limits of that knowledge. In jurisprudence, it is the difference between the acknowledgement of the existence of a right at a principle level, and the uncertainty or inability to put the right to practical use. In this article, the term used refers to the dissonance that exists between the recognized universality of the right to nationality and the inability of international law to exercise it.

• FDMN (Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals)The Government of Bangladesh describes Rohingya refugees as such. It does not refer to them as refugees, thus denying them the protection under the 1951 Convention on refugees.

• General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) (1948)The resolution affirmed Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes and receive compensation. It remains a central normative reference but lacks enforcement.

• Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)The judicial organ of the Inter-American human rights system. Its judgments are legally binding, though compliance depends on domestic implementation.

• Ipso FactoA Latin term meaning “by the fact itself.” In legal contexts, it denotes a consequence that follows automatically from an established condition, without the need for further action or declaration. In this article, it refers to the automatic inclusion of Palestinian refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention once UNRWA assistance ceases, as stipulated in Article 1D.

• JurisprudenceThe body of legal principles, interpretations, and reasoning developed through judicial or quasi-judicial decisions. It reflects how courts and legal institutions understand and apply the law over time. 

• Jus soli / Jus sanguinisTwo principles of nationality law: jus soli grants citizenship by birth on a state’s territory, while jus sanguinis bases it on descent. Their interplay shapes statelessness risks.

• Law 169-14 (Dominican Republic)A 2014 law adopted after TC 168-13, intended to restore nationality to some affected individuals and offer regularisation to others. Its implementation has been limited.

• PrecarityA condition of chronic insecurity or instability, often arising from the absence of legal status, protection, or economic rights. It describes how stateless persons live in a state of constant vulnerability, dependent on temporary administrative arrangements and lacking the guarantees of citizenship that provide safety, continuity, and recognition.

• RatificationThe formal act by which a state consents to be legally bound by a treaty after signing it. Ratification typically requires domestic approval, such as parliamentary endorsement or executive assent, and signifies the state’s intention to implement the treaty’s provisions in its national legal order. 

• Quasi-JudicialDefines a process or practice that fulfills comparable functions to those of a court, e.g., inquiring into facts, interpreting law, and making decisions without being a member of the formal judiciary. Administrative or international institutions often have quasi-judicial mechanisms to offer adjudicatory supervision where a complete process of the courts is lacking.

• SDPs (Statelessness Determination Procedures)Administrative or quasi-judicial procedures used by states to identify stateless persons and grant them legal status. Recommended by UNHCR but not universally adopted.

• SegregationThe systematic separation of groups within a population based on characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, or nationality. It may be enforced through law, policy, or social practice and often results in unequal access to rights, resources, and public spaces.

• TaingyinthaA Burmese term meaning “national races,” central to Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law. Only groups recognized as taingyintha are eligible for full citizenship, excluding the Rohingya by definition.

• TC 168-13 (Dominican Constitutional Court)A 2013 judgment retroactively stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian descent by reinterpreting constitutional nationality provisions.

• UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on MyanmarEstablished by the UN Human Rights Council in 2017 to investigate human rights violations in Myanmar. Its 2018 report documented systematic abuses against the Rohingya.

• UN General Assembly Resolution 3274 (XXIX)A 1974 resolution entrusting UNHCR with responsibilities related to the 1961 Convention and statelessness reduction, forming the institutional basis for UNHCR’s supervisory role.

• UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)The UN agency is mandated to protect refugees and stateless persons, including supervisory functions over the 1954 and 1961 Conventions.

• UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East)An agency of the UN formed in 1949 to give aid to Palestinian refugees in its five areas of operation. It is distinct in mandate, making it different to UNHCR.

• Universal Periodic Review (UPR)A peer-review mechanism of the UN Human Rights Council that examines states’ human rights records, increasingly used to raise issues of nationality and statelessness.

• Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic (2005)

• A landmark Inter-American Court judgment holding that denying nationality to children born in the Dominican Republic based on their parents’ irregular status violated Article 20 ACHR.