The UN Statelessness Convention was originally brought in to stop nations removing the citizenship of those who they were intent on oppressing. Foremost in the minds of those who formulated this Convention was the then recent memory of how the Nazis had removed citizenship rights from Germany’s Jews. Also present at the time in the minds of the framers of the Convention must also have been the issue of those who escaped from Communist hell holes who may have been declared as ‘non-persons’ by their government and thereby had no way of proving their national identity and who were left in a form of legal limbo. Because of the Statelessness Convention, which Britain signed up to decades ago, no signatory nation can declare or make a person stateless.

In general the Stateless Convention was set up for good and sound reasons and those who put it together were greatly influenced by the times that they were living and the horrific times that they had lived through. But maybe it’s time to reform this Convention to avoid it being exploited by chancers who should not be protected by it?

It’s a well known fact that those who enter countries like Britain illegally do so with no documentation to prove their origin. That way a nation like the UK which is bound by the Statelessness Convention will find it very hard to remove them to their home country as there might be difficulty in ascertaining where the person came from. Britain can end up hanging onto illegal migrants who we should and could be getting rid of but are prevented from doing so by the Statelessness Convention.

This story by Tom Winnifrith highlights the problem of deliberately disposed of documents when Mr Winnifrith returned to the UK from Greece:

Once again, my passport failed at the electric gates so I was directed to gates 36 and the one next door where troublemakers are sent. I heard at once a white guy from Border Force saying very loudly “We just do not believe you.” His female Asian colleague nodded. The man trying to get into Britain was not impressed.

His story was that he could not remember where he had come from and did not know which country he had landed in. He did not have a passport, Passenger Locator Form and details of a covid test.

Of course he would have needed all three to get on a plane to land at Heathrow as well as some money to pay for his test and for his flight.  He clearly chucked those documents down the plane loo so that his origins could not be traced. Once he was among the folks from dozens of planes at passport control he could have come from anywhere.

It’s likely that Border Force staff may have had some inkling or idea as to where he came from but that’s not good enough information to use to get rid of the illegal back where he came from. In this case he could have come from any of the aircraft that had landed but it might be difficult to ascertain which one.

This problem of illegals destroying their identification documents in order to make it difficult for them to be deported from the UK is a difficult one to solve. Some headway on this issue might come from, as Mr Winnifrith says by using facial recognition technology at the departure airport on anyone with a non British passport. The problem is that this would require the cooperation of departure airports and a multitude of different airlines which might not be easy to get.

Maybe the ultimate answer is to reform the Statelessness Convention so it protects the sort of people it was designed to protect and remove the loopholes in it that allow illegal migrants to enter the UK using the subterfuge of destroying their identification documents? How that reform would look and how long it would take to achieve is difficult for me to say but it’s plain to see that a Convention brought into being for good reasons is being exploited by bad actors in order to enter countries like the UK. Something does need to be done with the Statelessness Convention as it doesn’t seem to be able to cope with today’s challenges.