Goldston, James A. --- "Epilogue" [2011] ELECD 179; in Blitz, K. Brad; Lynch, Maureen (eds), "Statelessness and Citizenship" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Statelessness and Citizenship

Editor(s): Blitz, K. Brad; Lynch, Maureen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849800679

Section: Chapter 12

Section Title: Epilogue

Author(s): Goldston, James A.

Number of pages: 7

Extract:

12. Epilogue
James A. Goldston




Source: © Greg Constantine 2010.


Figure 12.1 Most Rohingya men in Bangladesh are exploited as
labourers. Several thousand work as bonded labourers and
are trapped into debt to local Bangladeshi boat owners. A
group of Rohingya men in southern Bangladesh push their
fishing boat out for another day's work.


As many as 175 million people worldwide are not citizens of the coun-
tries in which they reside. A sizeable percentage of them, an estimated 12
million, have been denied or deprived of a legal status ­ citizenship ­ that
serves, in practice, as a precondition to the enjoyment of many rights,
including voting, property ownership, health care, education and travel
outside one's own country.
Ill-treatment of non-citizens, arbitrary denial of citizenship and

209
210 Statelessness and citizenship

statelessness are twenty-first century problems that implicate fundamen-
tal questions of state sovereignty, human rights and non-discrimination.
While international law grants non-citizens virtually all rights to which
citizens are entitled, except the rights to vote, hold public office and exit
and enter at will, in reality, citizenship creates a giant loophole in the
international framework. As a result non-citizens remain among the most
vulnerable segments of humanity.
States improperly deploy the concept of citizenship to carve out signifi-
cant exceptions to the universality of human rights protection in two ways:
through deprivation of, and/or restrictions on access to, citizenship; and
through the imposition of distinctions between citizens and non-citizens.
When ...