Abstract

Statelessness is a phenomenon that affects millions of people worldwide. Those who find themselves without a recognised legal identity face obstructions from lack of access to a range of social, political and economic rights. The United Nations and its member states have recognised the challenge, most importantly by including target 16.9 into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aims to “provide legal identity for all” by 2030. A proliferation of registration and identification initiatives has accompanied the implementation of this goal. Yet, in a context of weak institutions and complex political economies, formalised identification can lead to even greater exclusion for some unregistered, stateless or marginalised populations – threatening the SDG’s ‘leave no one behind’ agenda. While human rights, governance and development actors stress the synergies between their respective agendas, significant frictions exist between technocratic and rights-based approaches. This seminar draws out some of the deeper complexities in order to understand why statelessness remains such a tenacious issue.

Bio

Christoph is a Visiting Scholar at the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast (2021-2022). He is also a Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, an Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law at the Royal University of Law and Economics, Cambodia. He holds a PhD from the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. Prior to joining academia, Christoph has worked for more than a decade on human rights and transitional justice, predominantly in Southeast Asia.

This event will be held both in person and online via MS Teams. 

Register via email to Michele Crepaz,  m.crepaz@qub.ac.uk