Diplomatic Protection for the Stateless Rohingya

Cross a border and you become a refugee, with protections international law can name. Stay, stateless, inside the state that stripped your nationality, and almost nothing attaches to you at all.

That asymmetry is the subject here. Of 193 UN member states, 104 are party to neither the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons nor the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, so most states owe the stateless in their territory no treaty obligation whatever. Over ten million people live in that position. The Rohingya in Rakhine, made stateless by Myanmar’s 1982 nationality law and then persecuted, are the illustration the piece works through.

Diplomatic protection is how a state takes up its national’s cause against another state. The stateless have no such state, by definition. The proposal put here is that the United Nations be empowered to perform that function for them, the one body whose membership is universal filling the vacuum. Its closing line is that even if the stateless are not citizens of any particular state, they are nonetheless citizens of the world.