“The New Unpeople” – from The Economist

Last updated on: February 26, 2015 at 11:01 pm by Jane the Actuary

“The New Unpeople” – from The Economist 2015-02-26T23:01:55-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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I’m trying to get my old posts labelled, which is very tedious. So as a break, a quick link, to an article in the Economist: “The new unpeople; Statelessness as punishment against political dissent in the Gulf.”

Here’s the story: Kuwait and Bahrain have a new method of responding to government critics. True, they’re not torturing them, or imprisoning them, but they are revoking their citizenship, leaving them stateless. Oman has passed a law permitting this, and this is under consideration in Saudi Arabia. And bear in mind this is not a matter of naturalized citizens, who can be deported back to their home countries. These are native Kuwaitis and Bahrainis.

And these are the Gulf states where citizenship is everything: without it, there is no school for the children, no healthcare, no way of living in society, except for that ever-contingent way of the stateless.

In Bahrain specifically, the Economist reports,

most of the 31 citizens stripped of their nationality in 2012 were abroad, but ten were left stateless in the country, unable to undertake any official business, be it registering newborns or getting a job. They cannot pass nationality to their children, who will be born into statelessness. On October 28th a court ordered the ten to be deported from the country as illegal residents; it is not clear how or to where they will travel without documents.

Now, other countries have worse human rights records. But these are countries which are generally regarded as civilized, and which attract large numbers of expatriates, both poor third-world construction workers and maids, and professionals from the developed world. And this certainly is yet more grounds for Glen Reynolds’ call for supporting Canadian oil production as “ethical oil”!

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