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How small Moldova ran one of Europe´s largest campaigns to prevent and address statelessness

News Stories, 17 August 2015

Born to Belarusian parents in 1941, Maria Gandrabura came to the Soviet Republic of Moldova in 1964 where she married a Moldovan. As she did not get the so called "compensation", a public grant for the poor, in 2014, she found out she needed to get an ID card from the Republic of Moldova, an independent state since 1991. Late in 2014, she was barred from voting and started to worry how she would pass her humble garden to her daughter without papers. Thanks to UNHCR-supported litigation, the lady won in an important court case and her statelessness was successfully prevented.

CHISINAU, MOLDOVA, Aug 17 (UNHCR) – Maria Gandrabura, 74, was desperate. Suddenly she could not withdraw her meagre pension of 1000 Moldovan Lei (50 USD).

The authorities refused to replace her old Soviet ID card. Without citizenship rights, she felt left behind in her humble farm house at the end of a dirt road where she grows grapes, cherries and vegetables.

"I had nowhere else to go," the widow said in tears. Today, she has a Moldovan ID card and her pension back – thanks to a UNHCR-supported campaign that helped prevent and address the statelessness of 212,000 people.

Until late 2012, 21 years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, over 220,000 people in the Republic of Moldova were holding expired Soviet ID cards.

Like Maria Gandrabura, with the expired documents, they did not have access to all basic citizenship rights such as to vote or to social assistance.

The Government of this independent country between Ukraine and Romania repeatedly called upon the population to get Moldovan IDs, but only when it launched a campaign offering the new IDs for free in 2014, did they start to see success. Many elderly people live on 1000 Moldovan Lei (some 50 USD) a month and did not want to spend the equivalent of up to 10 US Dollars on a new ID.

It became one of Europe´s largest campaigns to prevent and address statelessness since the turn of the century. Between January 2013 and June 2015 alone, a total of 212,000 people benefitted – one out of 20 Moldovan citizens.

"Political will was key," said UNHCR Protection Coordinator Sergiu Gaina: "and this can be replicated in other situations". As part of its #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024, UNHCR recently helped arrange a study visit by Armenian officials and NGO representatives to learn from Moldova's success story.

With support from UNHCR, all pensioners in Moldova received an information leaflet. The authorities sent mobile teams to those who were unable to come to the Passport Office. UNHCR's partner, the Legal Center of Advocates (LCA), established a hotline for free legal information. Sergiu Gaina, at the time with LCA, picked up the phone when Gandrabura´s family called. He helped the old lady who had been born in Belarus get the confirmation by the Belarusian authorities that she was not considered a national of that state.

However, the Moldovan Passport Office refused to issue a new Moldovan ID to Maria Gandrabura based on an internal instruction requiring a particular stamp. That came as a blow for the widow: "I thought: I am a Moldovan woman, this is my country, my five children and four grand-children are here", she says. "I thought I lost everything. I was crying", she whispers and breaks out in tears again.

That was not the only surprise: "In November 2014, I could not vote for Parliament. I had been voting all the time. I was really upset", says the 74-year old.

Initially, she thought it useless to argue the case in court, but after receiving legal advice from LCA, the lady finally appealed the decision taken by the Passport Office. After five months of uncertainty, she won her case. The court did not consider the stamp a requirement as it was not in the law.

"My first reaction was: Thank God and all those people that helped me", said Gandrabura. "I made a cross and then I went to get my pension and off to the market to buy everything I needed. I was so happy." She recovered several months of pension and social benefits.

Poor pensioners did not want to pay for a new ID. Others may have hung on to the Soviet ID because they wanted to be prepared for an uncertain future of this small country.

Iulian Popov, Head of the Statelessness and Information Unit at the Ministry of Interior, can understand why Soviet IDs had such a long life: "If you have a Moldovan ID card, you identify with Moldova, but with a Soviet ID you can identify with a huge power."

By Roland Schönbauer in Chisinau, Moldova

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Stateless People

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Mikhail Sebastian is a stateless man who has been living in the United States for more than a decade-and-a-half. In this video, he tells of the hardships he has faced and the importance of providing legal protections to stateless persons in the U.S.

Stateless in Beirut

Since Lebanon was established as a country in the 1920s there has been a long-standing stateless population in the country.

There are three main causes for this: the exclusion of certain persons from the latest national census of 1932; legal gaps which deny nationality to some group of individuals; and administrative hurdles that prevent parents from providing proof of the right to citizenship of their newborn children.

Furthermore, a major reason why this situation continues is that under Lebanese law, Lebanese women cannot pass on their nationality to their children, only men can; meaning a child with a stateless father and a Lebanese mother will inherit their father's statelessness.

Although exact numbers are not known, it is generally accepted that many thousands of people lack a recognized nationality in Lebanon and the problem is growing due to the conflict in Syria. Over 50,000 Syrian children have been born in Lebanon since the beginning of the conflict and with over 1 million Syrian refugees in the country this number will increase.

Registering a birth in Lebanon is very complicated and for Syrian parents can include up to five separate administrative steps, including direct contact with the Syrian government. As the first step in establishing a legal identity, failure to properly register a child's birth puts him or her at risk of statelessness and could prevent them travelling with their parents back to Syria one day.

The consequences of being stateless are devastating. Stateless people cannot obtain official identity documents, marriages are not registered and can pass their statelessness on to their children Stateless people are denied access to public healthcare facilities at the same conditions as Lebanese nationals and are unable to own or to inherit property. Without documents they are unable to legally take jobs in public administrations and benefit from social security.

Children can be prevented from enrolling in public schools and are excluded from state exams. Even when they can afford a private education, they are often unable to obtain official certification.

Stateless people are not entitled to passports so cannot travel abroad. Even movement within Lebanon is curtailed, as without documents they risk being detained for being in the country unlawfully. They also do not enjoy basic political rights as voting or running for public office.

This is the story of Walid Sheikhmouss Hussein and his family from Beirut.

Stateless in Beirut

The World's Stateless: A photo essay by Greg Constantine

Nationality might seem like a universal birthright, but it is estimated that up to 12 million people around the world are struggling to get along without it. They do not possess a nationality nor enjoy its legal benefits. They fall into a legal limbo; they are stateless. This often leaves them unable to do the basic things most people take for granted such as registering the birth of a child, travelling, going to school, opening a bank account or owning property.

Statelessness has a variety of causes. Some populations were excluded from citizenship at the time of independence from colonial rule. Others fall victim to mass denationalization. In some countries, women cannot confer nationality on their children. Sometimes, because of discrimination, legislation fails to guarantee citizenship for certain ethnic groups.

The problem is global. Under its statelessness mandate, UNHCR is advising stateless people on their rights and assisting them in acquiring citizenship. At the government level, it is supporting legal reform to prevent people from becoming stateless. With partners it undertakes citizenship campaigns to help stateless people to acquire nationality and documentation.

Photographer Greg Constantine is an award-winning photojournalist from the United States. In 2005, he moved to Asia and began work on his project, "Nowhere People," which documents the plight of stateless people around the world. His work has received a number of awards, including from Pictures of the Year International, NPPA Best of Photojournalism, the Amnesty International Human Rights Press Awards (Hong Kong), the Society of Publishers in Asia, and the Harry Chapin Media Award for Photojournalism. Greg was a co-winner of the Osborn Elliot Prize for Journalism in Asia, presented annually by the Asia Society. Work from "Nowhere People" has been widely published and exhibited in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Switzerland, Ukraine, Hong Kong and Kenya. He is based in Southeast Asia.

The World's Stateless: A photo essay by Greg Constantine

Statelessness Around the World

At least 10 million people in the world today are stateless. They are told that they don't belong anywhere. They are denied a nationality. And without one, they are denied their basic rights. From the moment they are born they are deprived of not only citizenship but, in many cases, even documentation of their birth. Many struggle throughout their lives with limited or no access to education, health care, employment, freedom of movement or sense of security. Many are unable to marry, while some people choose not to have children just to avoid passing on the stigma of statelessness. Even at the end of their lives, many stateless people are denied the dignity of a death certificate and proper burial.

The human impact of statelessness is tremendous. Generations and entire communities can be affected. But, with political will, statelessness is relatively easy to resolve. Thanks to government action, more than 4 million stateless people acquired a nationality between 2003 and 2013 or had their nationality confirmed. Between 2004 and 2014, twelve countries took steps to remove gender discrimination from their nationality laws - action that is vital to ensuring children are not left stateless if their fathers are stateless or unable to confer their nationality. Between 2011 and 2014, there were 42 accessions to the two statelessness conventions - indication of a growing consensus on the need to tackle statelessness. UNHCR's 10-year Campaign to End Statelessness seeks to give impetus to this. The campaign calls on states to take 10 actions that would bring a definitive end to this problem and the suffering it causes.

These images are available for use only to illustrate articles related to UNHCR statelessness campaign. They are not available for archiving, resale, redistribution, syndication or third party licensing, but only for one-time print/online usage. All images must be properly credited UNHCR/photographer's name