Papers by Heather Alexander
Over the last few years, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has launched a... more Over the last few years, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has launched a series of statelessness mapping projects to identify and, in some cases, quantify statelessness in countries around the world. The population of a country is surveyed during a statelessness mapping project, along with its legal framework and civil identity systems, to determine if statelessness exists in that country and, if possible, what types of people are at risk (including their location and numbers). To date, UNHCR has completed mapping projects in multiple countries in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
Multiple states are at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, forcing their popula... more Multiple states are at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, forcing their populations to flee. While the 1951 Refugee Convention provides the gold standard of international protection, it is only applied to a limited subset of people fleeing their countries, those who suffer persecution, which most people fleeing climate change cannot establish. While many journalists and non-lawyers freely use the term "climate refugees," governments, and courts, as well as UNHCR and many refugee experts, have excluded most climate refugees from the Convention as a matter of legal interpretation. In our 2015 paper, "Unable to Return in the 1951 Refugee Convention: Stateless Refugees and Climate Change", we sought to reopen the debate on "climate refugees" by arguing that some climate refugees qualify under the 1951 Convention as it is currently written: those who are stateless and are unable to return to their country of origin because climate change has rendered it uninhabitable. We rely on extensive legal analysis and the writings of experts. Our interpretation, however, has been rejected by Goodwin-Gill and McAdam (2021) and Foster and Lambert (2019), which explicitly responds to our paper. Here, we address and respond to their arguments.
Over the past century, governments around the world have greatly expanded civil registration and ... more Over the past century, governments around the world have greatly expanded civil registration and the issuance of identity documents of all kinds. The process of identifying and registering individuals is sometimes called establishing their 'legal identity'. 1 Establishing a legal identity is crucial for people to access many rights. 2 It is also a basic prerequisite for establishing a nationality. A legal identity is also important for governments to surveil their populations. Yet, as more research is done on the legal identity of nomadic and mobile peoples, 3 it is emerging that establishing a legal identity is not easy for them, nor is it a panacea that automatically helps them access their rights. Instead, it can lead to their assimilation. 4 This comment summarises my recent research into the establishment of legal identity for nomadic and mobile peoples, uncovering important and disturbing new insights into this fraught process. 5 Problems with establishing the legal identity of nomads stretch back to the colonial period. 6 The end of the colonial period saw the rapid introduction of laws creating identity documents and centralised registration around the world. However, the short time frame in which these systems were created meant that mass registration was in many cases never done and most rural peoples, including many nomads, entered decolonisation with no identity documents of any kind. Because nomads often lacked a fixed residence, colonial administrators struggled to register them and keep them within their designated, administrative zones. Meanwhile, colonial empires vested settled and urban rulers with enormous, centralised powers, including the power to issue documents, while marginalising nomadic leaders. Nomad territories, usually labelled by the colonial powers as *
Identité juridique et préservation du nomadisme comme mode de vie : les hommes Foulbé en Côte d’Ivoire, 2023
Identité juridique et préservation du nomadisme comme mode de vie : les hommes Foulbé en Côte d'I... more Identité juridique et préservation du nomadisme comme mode de vie : les hommes Foulbé en Côte d'Ivoire Legal identity and the preservation of nomadism as a way of life: Fulani men in Ivory Coast Résumé Au cours des vingt dernières années, les États ont considérablement élargi l'accès à l'état civil au moyen de l'établissement d'une identité juridique pour les individus qui, pour des raisons structurelles, n'y avaient pas eu accès auparavant. L'identité juridique est généralement considérée comme essentielle pour que les individus aient un statut reconnu auprès des États, pour que les États puissent garantir les droits humains de tout individu, dont le droit à sa propre identité culturelle et pour préserver les pratiques culturelles des populations autochtones. Pourtant, l'établissement d'une identité juridique n'est pas une panacée qui permettrait automatiquement aux individus de pouvoir faire valoir leurs droits ou de protéger leur culture. Au contraire, l'identité juridique constitue un couteau à double tranchant quand on l'instrumentalise contre des groupes marginalisés comme les nomades. Justement, dans cet article, on examine les expériences de la communauté Foulbé au nord de la Côte d'Ivoire qui sont relatives à l'identité juridique. On explore plus spécifiquement comment l'établissement ou le non-établissement d'une identité juridique affecte la capacité des hommes Foulbé à se protéger contre l'assimilation culturelle, à conserver leur mode de vie et aussi à se voir garantir un accès au système scolaire, aux services de santé et à la propriété terrienne. Bref, on met en lumière la crise sociétale chez les hommes Foulbé en Côte d'Ivoire, crise qui découle directement des problématiques d'identité juridique des Foulbé.
Canadian Journal of Law and Technology, 2023
This comment2 predicts that robot3 rights under the law are likely to become a reality in the nex... more This comment2 predicts that robot3 rights under the law are likely to become a reality in the next fifty years, possibly in multiple countries, as governments pass laws granting rights to robots, including civil rights like voting.4 This comment calls on the United Nations to be pro-active in guiding the emergence of robot rights by convening a working group on robot rights to better guide member states through what will be a time of momentous change. Why are robots likely to soon gain rights in some UN member states? There have been huge advances in AI that can pass the "Turing test,"5 where robots can mimic human behavior. Multiple companion robots are already on the market,6 specifically designed to have relationships with humans, and many humans will come to believe these robots are conscious, moral agents, even if experts disagree.7 Last summer, an engineer at the tech company Google was put on leave for claiming that one of the company's projects, an artificial intelligence (AI) chat bot called LaMDA, had achieved the sentience of a human child.8 It appears that the world has reached a tipping point on the question of robot rights. Robot rights are likely to emerge soon in multiple countries because, unlike animals,9 many robots will closely resemble humans in that they can communicate, mirror human emotions, and, most importantly, participate in society and government. Furthermore, the question of robot consciousness, a topic of 1
European University Institute, 2020
Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, create... more Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, created in 1992 and currently directed by Professor Brigid Laffan, aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research on the major issues facing the process of European integration, European societies and Europe's place in 21 st century global politics. The Centre is home to a large post-doctoral programme and hosts major research programmes, projects and data sets, in addition to a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration, the expanding membership of the European Union, developments in Europe's neighbourhood and the wider world. For more information: http://eui.eu/rscas The EUI and the RSCAS are not responsible for the opinions expressed by the author(s). GLOBALCIT GLOBALCIT is the successor of EUDO CITIZENSHIP, which has been the key reference for the study of citizenship and the franchise between 2009 and 2017. With the geographic expansion of the Observatory's scope the new name reflects our worldwide coverage. GLOBALCIT provides the most comprehensive source of information on the acquisition and loss of citizenship in Europe for policy makers, NGOs and academic researchers. Its website hosts a number of databases on domestic and international legal norms, naturalisation statistics, citizenship and electoral rights indicators, a comprehensive bibliography and glossary, a forum with scholarly debates on current citizenship trends, media news on matters of citizenship policy and various other resources for research and policy-making. Research for the 2019 GLOBALCIT Reports has been supported by the European University Institute's Global Governance Programme, and the British Academy Research Project CITMODES (co-directed by the EUI and the University of Edinburgh). The financial support from these projects is gratefully acknowledged.
Unable to Return' in the 1951 Refugee Convention: Stateless Refugees and Climate Change
Florida Journal of International Law, 2015
Argues that it is not only a point of literal construction, but also inherent in the object and p... more Argues that it is not only a point of literal construction, but also inherent in the object and purpose of the 1951 Refugee Convention, that displaced stateless persons unable to return to their countries of former habitual residence may be eligible for refugee status even if unpersecuted. 'Unable to return' as it occurs in the clause following the semi-colon of 1(A)2 of the 1951 Refugee Convention must be understood as a term of art subject to appropriate canons of construction in its own right. Its construal must therefore be more restrictive than many commentators have suggested, though not so strict as to preclude all but persecuted persons. Then argues that, as a case study, those who are displaced from their island nations because those nations have submerged beneath the sea will count as 'unable to return' in the relevant sense, and so will qualify for Convention refugee status, if they count as lacking a nationality, i.e. as stateless.
Statelessness & Citizenship Review, 2019
Sinking into Statelessness
Tilburg Law Review, 2014
If rising seas render small islands uninhabitable, will displaced islanders become stateless? The... more If rising seas render small islands uninhabitable, will displaced islanders become stateless? The modern intellectual and legal tradition tells us that states must have defined, habitable territory. If so, small islands will cease to be states, and their inhabitants will accordingly become stateless. Against this, leading scholars have recently argued that the principle of presumption of continuity of state existence implies that island states continue to be states even after becoming uninhabitable. We argue to the contrary: the principle of presumption of continuity of state existence implies no such thing. If nothing is done to prevent the loss of their territory, small islands will lose their statehood, making displaced islanders stateless.
Golden Gate UL Rev., 2004
The Nationality and Statelessness of Nomads Under International Law
And analysis of the nationality and statelessness of nomads under international law, with a compr... more And analysis of the nationality and statelessness of nomads under international law, with a comprehensive examination of the nationality and statelessness of former Bedouin in Kuwait, Tuareg in Mali and Sama Dilaut (Bajau Laut) in Malaysia.
Statelessness & Citizenship Review, 2020
To establish a legal identity is to be recognised as a person before the law. See '
Washington International Law Journal, Apr 1, 2017
Territorial loss owing to sea level rise presents novel challenges to the international legal ord... more Territorial loss owing to sea level rise presents novel challenges to the international legal order. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of small island states like the Maldives, Tuvalu and Kiribati, whose very existence is in jeopardy. In our recent article, Sinking Into Statelessness, 1 we argue that the principle of presumption of continuity of state existence does not ensure that sinking states shall, or may, retain their legal statehood, because that principle cannot overrule the fact that territoriality is a constitutive feature of legal statehood. Here, we argue that even if, contra our previous conclusion, submerged states retain their legal statehood, territory is nevertheless necessary in order for a state to confer nationality in the sense of the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons; that is, for a state to consider someone a national under the operation of its law. In consequence, even granting that a submerged state could exist and have members, its members would need nationality in another state in order to avoid de jure statelessness. To establish this claim, we will argue that for a state to consider someone a national under the operation of its law, that state must be capable of complying with the duty to readmit nationals when requested to do so by another state, which requires habitable territory.
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Papers by Heather Alexander