TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was basically sneaking into the classrooms, in getting access to education. And every time a public inspector would visit, I had to just disappear or stay at home or miss class. Because on that piece of paper, I really did not exist in that classroom.”
What if you didn't belong anywhere?
If even the country you were born in doesn't recognise you as a citizen.
You are unable to access healthcare, education or even get a licence.
United Nations figures suggest that this can be the life for some of at least 4.4 million stateless people in the world.
I’m Youssef Saudie, and this podcast is ‘Belonging Nowhere’, an investigation into what it means to be stateless and have a disputed nationality.
“So the legal definition of statelessness is a person who's not recognised as a national by any country in the world. So what that means is that there's no country in the world that has granted its nationality to that person. Now of course everyone is born somewhere. So everyone has some kind of attachment to a state. But there are many situations in which just the because the person has been born in the country doesn't give rise to a right to nationality.”
That's Michelle Foster, the inaugural director of the University of Melbourne's Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, one of the biggest research centres in Australia dedicated to statelessness and help provide legal advice to stateless people.
So is statelessness a new thing?
Not quite.
"After World War Two, the international community was very concerned about the millions of people who had been displaced, many of whom were stateless, because, of course, de-nationalisation was a tool that was invoked by the Nazi regime. And so many of the people that have been displaced were stateless, as well.”
Professor Foster says the United Nations held a stateless convention in 1954 - just three years after the 1951 refugee convention.
It set out an international legal definition of a stateless person as someone 'who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law'.
2024 marked 70 years since the first convention on statelessness.
“In 1961, there was the second Treaty, which is about preventing statelessness or reducing statelessness. So the first treaty was about protecting the people who are already stateless. And the second treaty was about ensuring that we don't continue to have new cases of statelessness.”
Australia is party to both the 1954 Convention the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.
But decades later, we still have stateless people, and the exact global number of stateless people is difficult to work out.
“So I think it's fair to say that statelessness over the years became almost sort of the poor second cousin to refugee law. States were very concerned about refugees, perhaps because it's more visible when people are on the move, it's hard to ignore these populations, whereas most stateless people are what we call in situ, you know, they don't move. They stay in the countries in which they've been, as I said, for generations. So for several decades, the issue of statelessness really was overlooked. There was no real focus on it from the perspective of international action, academia, advocacy, it really was quite dormant. Fast forward several decades, and the UNHCR now has the mandate to identify and protect stateless people but that wasn't always the case."
So how does someone become stateless?
Professor Foster says there are many ways someone can become stateless, but the main reason is discrimination.
“So think about the range of discrimination that people suffer across the world. And we can think of lots of examples. So gender discrimination is an ongoing live issue in this context. There are still 24 countries globally that don't allow women to pass on their nationality to their children. And so that is a major drive a driver of intergenerational statelessness.”
The town of Koura in Northern Lebanon is where Fadi Chalouhy was born and raised.
His mother is Lebanese and his father, Syrian.
But he was not like the other kids.
“To summarise it, it's probably being born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and in the wrong circumstances.”
The problem was in Lebanon’s nationality laws.
“So six months after I was born, my father left, and he didn't want to do anything to anything to do with me, which unfortunately left my mother unable to register to me at all. Because in Lebanon up to today, to create or establish any paperwork for a child - a birth certificate or driver's licence, or open a bank account - you need to be male, you need the father present. And if the father is not there, the woman is basically rendered helpless.”
Fadi was stateless.
And as he got older, he encountered new obstacles.
“My mother tried to enrol me in a lot of public schools, but she was denied each and every time and the only way I managed to get education is because my mother was a cleaner at the local Catholic school. And so she just talked to the nuns and said, 'Hey, please, can you please just help my son learn how to read and write, just so he'll have a fighting chance in life'. And so I was basically sneaking into the classrooms, in getting access to education. And every time a public inspector would visit, I had to just disappear or stay at home or miss class. Because on that piece of paper, I really did not exist in that classroom.”
There were other issues too.
“If I got sick, I couldn't go to the hospital. Later on, when I graduated, I couldn't I didn't have access to any work. So any time there's a roadblock or a police check, I would get pulled over and questioned and I did not have any documentation to prove who I was. So I had to tell my story from the beginning. And my mother had to hitchhike her way to that army roadblock and try to convince them and tell them my story.”
Fadi found even simple things felt like a monumental challenge.
“I had to time it in a way and almost do reconnaissance and ask around to make sure that during that period, there is no roadblocks and it's safe for me to go to the pharmacy. Same thing when going to university, when going to work, every single simple chore for me needed to be pre-planned and well organised to make sure I don't end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and on a roadblock because for me, that would be the end of the day, held in detention forever. And it just been an absolute nightmare.”
Fadi says he felt vulnerable all the time.
“You could shoot me in the streets of Lebanon and you wouldn't even go to jail because technically speaking, you didn't shoot anyone, I don't exist. And that was the root cause for all my problems. I did not exist, which meant that if I want to go and get a driver's licence, who are you? Fadi doesn't exist. So if you don't exist, how would you get a driver's license? And if you don't exist, how would you get a social security number? If you don't exist, how would you get a proper student card? If you don't exist how can you open a bank account? If you don't exist how can you get a police check? And if you can't get a police check, not driver's license, not a bank account, how can you apply for work when all of these are prerequisite documentation to do that?"
Fadi did not understand statelessness as a concept, and says there’s a lack of awareness or understanding of it where he grew up.
He says it just hurt.
“It felt like in Lebanon I was trapped in a toxic relationship that I couldn't escape from. And for a lot of periods, it felt like a one-sided love story. You know, for 28 years it just, I cannot describe how hurt it felt. You're born in a country, you spend your entire life in it, you speak the language, you know, the culture, you're part of that country, but the country doesn't want you.”
Fadi is not alone.
Human rights lawyer Alison Battison says the feeling is common among stateless people.
In fact many people don't know that they're stateless. I've certainly worked with quite a number of people who are surprised to learn that in the detention environment that they actually don't have a choice between going back to the country they came from and detention because the country they came from doesn't recognise them as a citizen.”
It was in 2016 when Fadi came across a non-governmental organisation called Talent Beyond Boundaries.
The organisation helps skilled refugees and migrants to find international employment opportunities.
At the time, he was a project manager working with a French software company.
He found that he fit the criteria of a skilled stateless person and that led Fadi to a corporate organisation in Australia.
“I had a couple of interviews, and they sponsored me. And I ended up coming to Australia on a skills shortage visa in 2019 - the first and only stateless person in history to be issued a skills shortage visa. And that's how I ended up coming here.”
He says he feels like in just six months he has achieved more than he achieved in Lebanon in 28 years.
“Never in a million years would I have thought that I'll be a citizen of any country, never mind a country as good as Australia.”
He says he couldn’t have done it without his mother.
“I used to watch my mother every day at 6am clean each and every classroom and empty the bins and take out the garbage. And she used to always tell me, 'Oh, you have a choice. You're either cleaning a classroom or you're learning from it.' And she drove me to have an education.”
But when Fadi came to Australia he wasn't able to bring his mother, who died in Lebanon.
He is one of thousands of people estimated to have come to Australia from a stateless background.
Lawyer Alison Battison says there are various ways people can come to the country as a stateless person.
She says many are hampered by Australia's immigration system.
“The system we have at the moment in Australia tries to squash statelessness into the definition of refugees. And sometimes that does work. Sometimes you're a refugee because you're persecuted, because you're stateless and you don't have any protection. But where you're stateless and you've ended up in Australia and you can't leave, but you're not persecuted and you don't meet that definition of refugee, you're screwed (in trouble) - there's nowhere else for you to go, there's no visa category to cover you.”
For Fadi, he is now an Australian citizen, since 2024 and is happy with his place in the country.
But he says statelessness is not being treated as a standalone issue, and he would like Lebanon to sign the UN’s convention on stateless people’s rights.
He says this would help people access basic human rights like other citizens.
“I couldn't think of a more marginalised, neglected, ignored group of people as stateless. And the amount of money being pumped into refugee courses and NGO compared to stateless people is absolutely shocking and it's time for that bucket to be filled, and for those people to be given an equal amount of attention. So if anyone could take anything out of this message, give stateless people some attention - they desperately need it.”
The next episode of Belonging Nowhere looks at minority groups who are stateless and how they have made it to Australia.
