Stateless in Europe: 'We are no people with no nation'

Sitting in the living room of her Berlin apartment, Sanaa* watches proudly as her one-year-old daughter clings to the edge of a coffee table and hauls herself to her feet. Siba* squeals with delight, then drops back down with a giggle. Being a single mother is hard work, but filled with daily rewards. Sanaa, who fled the Syrian war, is just thankful for the chance to raise a child.

Experts are warning that children such as Siba could turn into a stateless generation. Though the infant was born in Berlin after her mother arrived from Damascus, there is no automatic German citizenship. And under Syrian law, a child can only inherit nationality from its father. As a single mother, Sanaa was well aware that Siba would be stateless.

“There is no paper for Siba in Syria. Because it’s the law, you don’t have any relations before you are married. People have boyfriends but it’s secret,” Sanaa says. “We just grow up and this is the rule. We didn’t know that the women in other countries can give their nationality [to their children], or we didn’t care because we would get married and the child would have a nationality.”Now, conflict and displacement have left 25% of Syrian refugee households fatherless, according to the UN. Most European countries, including Germany, tie nationality to the “right of blood” and none automatically grants citizenship to all children born on their soil. Although international treaties oblige states to ensure every child’s right to a nationality, European governments are failing to do so, or even to recognise that children are being born stateless at all.The UN released a report this month calling for global action on child statelessness. “In the short time that children get to be children, statelessness can set in stone grave problems that will haunt them throughout their childhoods and sentence them to a life of discrimination, frustration and despair,” said the UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres.

At least 10 million people globally do not have citizenship of any country, according to the UN. Without nationality, stateless people cannot vote and can find it difficult or impossible to gain access to healthcare, education and employment.

The UN estimates that there are 680,000 stateless people in Europe, though experts say the figure is likely to be much higher. There are hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia and Estonia who became “non-citizens” following the fall of the Soviet Union. There are thousands of Roma in Italy and the Balkans left stateless in large part due to the breakup of Yugoslavia. 

The experiences of these long-term stateless people highlight the dismal fate that awaits Syrian children if their legal nationality is not resolved.

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Beyond Rome’s frenzied centre, the quiet outer suburb of Monte Mario is home to a “nomad camp” where many of the residents are stateless. There is an uneasy calm after the police shut down the camp’s weekly flea market. It’s a regular flashpoint in tense relations between Roma residents and the municipality.

Roma began migrating to Italy from the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s when, following the death of dictator Josip Tito, a rise in Yugoslav nationalism saw them become increasingly marginalised. The numbers of displaced Roma moving to Italy swelled again in the 90s during the Bosnian war as Europe faced another massive wave of displacement.