Equally unequal – inclusion of the stateless and the undocumented in responses to Covid-19

Nearly 18 months on from the start of the pandemic, a lot has changed.  We (well, some of us) have access to vaccines, ventilators, oxygen and even funding to support those who have suffered loss of earnings.  But many countries have struggled to provide the healthcare and financial support their residents and citizens need.  Equally, rolling out the vaccine has not been easy in states with a shortage of healthcare professionals and where the infrastructure needed to deliver the vaccine is lacking.  Not to mention the inequitable sharing of the vaccine in large enough quantities to make a difference worldwide.

In this blog, I look at how well stateless people and those without a legal identity, their status irregular and precarious, have been included in states’ response to Covid-19.

 

Statelessness and Covid-19 – the challenges

As I wrote in my last blog on this topic, access to healthcare, to education, and to other basic state services is already difficult for stateless and undocumented people.  Undocumented people in refugee camps, stateless people in detention and those facing multiple barriers, including those who are afraid to engage with the state in normal times are even more vulnerable during the pandemic.

The number of stateless people in a state can be difficult to estimate.  Many states make little effort to count and keep track of the stateless or undocumented in their boundaries.   Covid-19, as we have seen, requires a state-wide response very much based on data and on knowing and understanding how different groups of residents and citizens might be affected by the pandemic.  Although it is difficult to estimate the extent of the problem facing stateless communities, we know that the pandemic has hit the uncounted and the unseen especially hard ¹.

That is why it is especially important that stateless and undocumented people are included in states’ responses to Covid-19, including through prevention, testing and treatment.

 

What has changed since the start of the pandemic?

Access to medical care remains an issue. In Ukraine, a survey of stateless respondents has shown that just under half of those surveyed had been denied access to a doctor during the pandemic.  The reason given is lack of documentation and identification to evidence entitlement ².

As of July 2021, UNHCR reports that many states are still not including stateless people in their immunisation plans ³.  In Europe, where the vaccine is more widely available, only 24 of 45 European states have confirmed that they will vaccinate their stateless populations ⁴.

Vaccines and health care provisions aside, it seems that stateless and undocumented communities continue to be marginalised and ignored by state responses to Covid-19.  For example, in India, those who are stateless have not received the same financial assistance provided to citizens and documented residents ⁵.

 

Covid-19 will continue to drive inequality

I have written before about the importance, especially in reducing the risk of statelessness, of civil registration systems.  The registration of key life events, such as births, is essential for individual legal identity.  The pandemic caused many basic services provided by the state to stop or to run at a reduced level.  That meant that the universality of those services was severely limited.  During the pandemic, some people were not and could not be reached.  Resources were reduced, with officials responsible for the provision of those services either themselves ill with Covid, working from home, or subject to travel and movement bans, an essential part of lockdown restrictions in many states.

Civil registration and vital statistics gathering were impacted greatly.  Argentina has suspended birth and death registration.  Uganda closed civil registration offices for several months.  In Zimbabwe, there is a backlog of some 200,000 birth registrations.  Suspended birth registrations will no doubt lead to increased statelessness because of under-registration or missing or inaccurate vital statistics ⁶.  Children and their families will be unable to prove place of birth.  This can impact on their right to be registered as citizens in the state where they were born.

Other services which are important to stateless people, such as statelessness determination procedures, have also been impacted during the pandemic.  In several states, including Poland, Germany and Bulgaria, decision deadlines have been extended.  This has left many people in continued limbo and without a determination on their legal status ⁷.

 

Improving the outcomes for stateless people must be a priority

What can be done to improve the outcomes for stateless people during and after the pandemic?

Recommendations by the UN made in the early days of the pandemic, in May 2020, are still relevant.  They include making access to health services, Covid-19 testing, treatment (and now vaccination) accessible to all, regardless of citizenship, residency, or legal status in a state.  Messaging around Covid-19, self-care and available services is important and information campaigns must be inclusive of stateless people, refugees, asylum seekers and the undocumented ⁸.

More recently, a report from Institutes SI together with the Covid-19 Emergency Statelessness Fund (CESF) Consortium Together We Can: The Covid-19 Impact on Stateless People and a Roadmap for Change, notes the extensive impact of Covid-19 on stateless people and echoes the UN recommendations.  The Together We Can report sets out a three-step roadmap to  minimise that impact and protect the rights of stateless people.

The first is to check for institutional blind spots.  That means reviewing policies and practices and reforming them to ensure that stateless people are prioritised.  The second is to ensure that interventions to improve the lives of stateless people are done following dialogue and consultation with those affected.  This is the only way to ensure that their needs and priorities are being met.  Finally, it is important to focus on much needed reforms to address discriminatory nationality laws, policies, and practices.  I have written extensively on the impact of discriminatory nationality laws here, here and here.

 

Why prioritise stateless people?

How we take care of the marginalised and the invisible is a good barometer for how well our own systems are holding up against the pandemic.  If our vaccines are not reaching the stateless and undocumented, can we be sure we have vaccinated everyone we need to?  If access to healthcare systems is daunting or impossible for those who are undocumented, are we reaching everyone using existing infrastructures and messaging?  And if we have closed off or reduced civil registration systems, have we increased the number of stateless and undocumented people?

In a global pandemic, where no one is safe until everyone is safe, we cannot afford to leave behind those that are invisible and uncounted.