Title: Permanent exceptions to citizens: the stateless in South Asia

Authors: Paula Banerjee

Addresses: GD 273, Sector III, Salt Lake, Kolkata 700106, India

Abstract: The purport of this paper is to explain that citizenship and statelessness are part of the same grid. There are many people in South Asia who fall within that grid who will not be accepted as a citizen by competent authorities within a state and neither will they be called stateless by the international legal interpreters. Those in places like Geneva might say that these people should be called citizens by a particular state, and can be called a citizen if the citizenship laws of that state are improved, but the reality remains, the people in question are completely unable to access even the most elementary of the rights attributed to a citizen. This paper will map some of these indeterminate people in South Asia and discuss how national and international practices instead of helping them often leave them as permanent exceptions to citizenship.

Keywords: stateless persons; citizens; displaced; refugees; protracted displacement; permanent exceptions; South Asia; statelessness; citizenship.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2016.075584

International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 2016 Vol.2 No.2, pp.119 - 131

Received: 28 Feb 2015
Accepted: 21 Sep 2015
Published online: 28 Mar 2016 *

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