Interview with Aleksejs Ivashuk from Apatride Network

How would you describe yourself and your organisation?

Mostly composed of stateless or formerly stateless individuals. Apatride Network works on addressing the overlooked human rights issue of statelessness in the EU and beyond. It is one of the most impactful organisations working on statelessness. What makes the organisation so impactful, despite its limited resources, is the dedication and passion of its members in their drive to help fellow affected people. The organisation focuses on awareness raising, legal assistance, strategic litigation and impact projects that target for removal the many barriers that stateless people face. Apatride Network goes beyond speaking about statelessness or stateless people, providing a platform for its members to utilise ground-level statelessness expertise, amplify their own perspectives and play an active role in shaping solutions.

How do you see the situation of people on the move and/or the communities you advocate for? And how do you see things across Europe more broadly?

Very few stateless people are able to access the right to migrate, obtain travel documents to do so, or attain permission from a potential host country to receive them. Generally, for stateless people all over the world, accessing a refugee status is a privilege that few are able to access. This is why so few stateless people can migrate into the EU, and why the majority of stateless people in the EU and Europe are locally rooted. For example, our founder’s roots are Latvian, Ukrainian and Polish. We have other members that have Greek, Italian, Albanian, Cypriot, Lithuanian and Estonian ancestry. Some of us even have these roots and ethnicity highlighted in our documents and made clear by our names. But this is not how stateless people are imagined. This misconception – that stateless people are from somewhere “else”– is a big part of the problem. It is a result of systemic mislabelling by state authorities seeking to avoid accountability for what they have done.

No matter where we look in the world, stateless people are, in fact, from the very territories where they are made stateless, but are not legally recognised as belonging on that territory. This is a result of intended discrimination or insufficient competence of the authorities in making flawless nationality laws. Historical proof of facts and factual nationality do not necessarily translate into legally granted nationality and belonging.

For the minority of stateless people in Europe who are in the migratory context, the situation is increasingly affected by the securitisation of migration and the shrinking space for civil society. Stateless people are often caught between migration control systems and nationality laws that fail to recognise them. As a result, they are over-represented in detention and under-represented in policymaking, data collection and public debates.

In such a difficult context when it is easy to lose hope, what motivates you to keep doing this work?

We seek to help states live up to the fundamental rights and principles by which they are supposed to function. Stateless people are made stateless and refugees are made refugees because of the failures of the nation state system in providing security, equality, rule of law and justice. Only states  have the power to make people stateless and, therefore, engaging and challenging state structures is key to change.

In our line of work, we witness how even small interventions such as helping someone prove their identity, challenging a wrongful decision or supporting a stateless person through an application to be recognised as stateless can truly change lives for the better.

Due to having to live life at a much higher level of difficulty, stateless people are resourceful, creative and resilient. Their example drives us forward. Despite being denied recognition, stateless people continue to develop and thrive, build communities, create art, organise and contribute to the societies that exclude them. Through Apatride Network, we see how collective action can transform separation and isolation into empowerment. By working together, we can hold the faulty governance systems accountable and push them towards meaningful reform.

What would you say to people living in Europe with passport privilege, silently watching all this unfold?

Europeans need to overcome the dangerous complacency in thinking that human rights issues do not occur by their hands. This is the kind of complacency and assumption of superiority that makes us comfortable in overlooking human rights violations that we commit.

Throughout centuries and to this day, Europeans have sought refuge all over the world because of the violence we have caused to each other. It is highly hypocritical for us to want to close our own door and expect the world to keep theirs open.

Many factors contribute to why people are forced into refugee situations or statelessness, and rarely does it have anything to do with the actions of the affected individuals themselves. Case in point: the European arms industries continue to profit from global conflicts, contributing to the very crises that force people to flee and seek international protection.

The very existence of statelessness is a disgrace for the nation state model of governance. The power structures that are supposed to protect us are perpetually corrupted by the very powers that they hold.

It is important to keep in mind that we belong, above all, not to governments or bureaucracies, but to each other and ourselves.

What sort of Europe (and possibly world) would you like to see in the future, and what do you think it take to make it a reality?

EU fundamental values and rights are not blank terms: they need the backing of our behaviour to be realised.

European values such as democracy, justice, minority rights and freedom do not come about by themselves. It is the job of every European to be a conscious member of civil society and to be aware of European shortcomings like statelessness.

Beyond awareness, meaningful action must be taken to alleviate and resolve such problems.

We must be accountable for the problems that we make and maintain. Going forward, we need a Europe that can consistently practice what it preaches.

Other members of the Apatride Network team contributed to this interview.

For more information about Apatride Network, please visit their website.

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