The Fate of the Stateless

A minority group within a minority group. That is how this piece, written for a Bangladeshi readership as the Rohingya influx intensified, describes people who are stateless but have not crossed a border.

The legal limbo is set out directly. Most UN member states are party to neither statelessness convention. The stateless are therefore neither treated as aliens, with what that status carries, nor granted the basic protections owed to a refugee. They fall between the two categories international law actually provides for.

The remedy pressed is the same one I had argued a month earlier in a different forum: that the international community extend diplomatic protection to the stateless through the United Nations.

Reading both versions together shows something about writing for different rooms. One argues to an international policy audience about a gap in the architecture. This one argues to the country that was, at that moment, receiving the people the gap had failed.