Because they aren’t recognized as citizens by any country, stateless people lack “the right to have rights,” as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt famously put it. Having fled Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1933, Arendt herself spent nearly two decades of her life stateless. Nearly a century later, statelessness persists as a problem all over the world—including in Southeast Asia, where hundreds of thousands may be affected.
Christoph Sperfeldt, a researcher who focuses on statelessness, explains that few Southeast Asian countries ratified the major international agreements adopted in 1954 and 1961. He notes recent progress, however: in 2012, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations declared that “every person has the right to a nationality as prescribed by law.”
Still, stateless populations are especially vulnerable to cross-border criminal cartels involved in human trafficking, gun-running, and drug smuggling, warns researcher Bill Berkeley.
Sakinah Kahtu was being smuggled to Malaysia—a desperate act arranged by her parents to protect her from potential sexual violence by government soldiers—when her boat was seized by human traffickers, who demanded a high “asking price” for her freedom. A stranger who paid the ransom married her days later—even though Sakinah, an ethnic minority Rohingya unable to claim citizenship in Myanmar, may still have been a minor.
Her story “illustrates the often overlooked linkages between statelessness and early and forced marriage,” writes human rights lawyer Sheila Menz. “[B]ecause no state had conferred a nationality under which Kahtu could claim protection … she was forced to flee and rendered particularly vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking, and gender-based violence.”
The long history of colonialism in Southeast Asia is one reason statelessness persists in the region. “Many state-building projects were confined to borders drawn by colonial powers and have since witnessed a dynamic reformulation of citizenship regimes, often nurtured by intercommunal tensions that had been exacerbated during colonial rule,” Sperfeldt explains. For example, a grassroots organization in Malaysia found more than 12,350 undocumented individuals descended from Tamil Indians who migrated during the British colonial period.
Poor record-keeping can be another cause of statelessness, especially among ethnic minorities, refugees, and people living in remote communities, since children whose births aren’t registered are often unable to prove their parentage and claim nationality.
Sperfeldt points out that most stateless Southeast Asians belong to “minorities who live in the country in which they were born,” such as ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia or ethnic Chinese in Brunei.
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“[L]aws may be well drafted but their application has consistently shown discriminatory patterns. An example is the difficulties faced by stateless Vietnamese populations in Cambodia in accessing birth registration, not to mention nationality,” he elaborates.
In 2018, a junior football team in Thailand made headlines for surviving nearly three weeks in a flooded cave complex—but their dramatic rescue also shone a spotlight on the plight of the team’s assistant coach and three of the 12 boys who were trapped.
The multilingual teenager who acted as an interpreter between the team and British rescue divers belongs to the Wa ethnic minority and was born stateless. He and his fellow stateless teammates received Thai citizenship after their rescue.
This predicament is not limited to the Wa, but also affects other regional indigenous and tribal groups, such as Karen and Hmong communities in the highlands of Thailand.
Many members of these hill tribes lack access to education, healthcare, legal employment, and suffrage, with Berkeley calling them “rightless”—a word straight from Arendt.
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Yet statelessness is often obscured when individuals with irregular paperwork—such as the Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar for Malaysia—are criminalized as “illegal migrants.”
Human rights law experts David Weissbrodt and Clay Collins observe that statelessness can be addressed through “preemptive remedies,” such as properly registering births and constitutionally granting citizenship to children who would otherwise be born stateless.
Still, for nation-states, naturalizing all residents who currently lack citizenship can be “the only complete remedy for stateless persons,” they add. The scholarship suggests that statelessness is less an administrative oversight than a consequence of the ways states define who belongs.
