Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory by Patrick Hayden

Author:Patrick Hayden [Hayden, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781134057924
Google: eWbuYUlf4OUC
Goodreads: 17475944
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

From exclusion to containment: statelessness as global apartheid

Efforts have been made to address the problems identified by Arendt, but because these efforts remain configured by the imperatives of sovereign power, success in this direction has been limited at best. Considered in the context of the preceding discussion, it is clearly not coincidental that the contemporary international human rights regime continues to enshrine a set of universal human rights in conjunction with the power of sovereignty, while attempting to fashion specific protection regimes around the vulnerabilities and identities of particular groups, such as with the various refugee and statelessness treaties. The result is, to a large degree, a reinscription of the contradictions that have haunted human rights declarations throughout the age of the modern nation-state.

The 1948 UDHR, for example, contains several articles introduced because of the rise of the incidence of statelessness following the First and Second World Wars. Article 15 declares that ‘[e]veryone has the right to a nationality’ and that ‘[n]o one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality’. Further, Article 13 states that ‘[e]veryone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’, while Article 14 asserts that ‘[e]veryone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’. There are, however, several difficulties with these claims. First, because sovereign states have the self-authorized right to determine the conditions and criteria for the acquisition as well as termination of citizenship, they are supposed to remedy the problems of statelessness and denationalization of which they are the very source. Second, even the proscription of denationalization is conditional upon the sovereign determination of what constitutes an ‘arbitrary’ deprivation of rights, the standards of which can always be lowered in light of national security interests. Third, while the UDHR allows for a right of exit from a given state, it does not recognize a corresponding right of entry into another, which not only makes the asserted right of exit of dubious worth, but virtually guarantees the condition of statelessness for persons forcibly displaced from, or denationalized by, their country of origin. Finally, these rights are formulated in such a way as to reinforce the notion that nationality is a prerequisite to holding human rights, and thus that those without effective or legal nationality are necessarily rightless. This implication is at odds with Article 2 of the UDHR, which requires states to recognize the rights of all persons ‘without distinction of any kind’, including of ‘national or social origin’ or ‘other status’ (this non-discrimination clause is repeated in the 1966 International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights, and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).

Further international efforts directed towards refugees and statelessness occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Geneva Convention) was adopted in 1951, and established a narrow definition of a refugee as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or ‘habitual residence’

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