Ensuring the Resources to End Statelessness Together

The financial resourcing of statelessness research is one of the most challenging aspects of our work. Funders have heard of many other human right issues but, due to the often-unseen nature of statelessness, it remains an outlier. As a result, it is difficult for donors who are hearing about the issue for the first time to believe that such a problem can exist in the 21st century, let alone get to the point that they are convinced that this is an area that is worthy of their funding support.  

As members of the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, we are committed to collaborative, coordinated action. This means helping ensure that we have the financial and other resources needed to catalyse and accelerate positive change. We believe that statelessness is solvable through a well-resourced whole-of-society approach. 

The Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, which I serve as Deputy Director, is the world’s only university-based centre focused on addressing statelessness through education, research and public policy engagement activities. Due to a generous grant from Peter and Ruth McMullin, the Centre was established seven years ago at the University of Melbourne Law School in response to the deficit in awareness, research and impactful policy engagement on statelessness globally. The Asia Pacific region hosts the largest known population of stateless people in the world.  

The Centre is committed to producing robust, and cutting-edge research. It offers up-to-date teaching and training to scholars and practitioners through its intensive online course, law masters elective and stateless legal clinic. It produces independent, evidence-based analysis to support progressive law and policy reform on nationality and statelessness issues in Australia and the Asia Pacific.   

We have worked closely within the Global Alliance Taskforce since its inception, and we are incredibly excited about the Global Alliance’s potential to bring together relevant actors to prevent and reduce statelessness more holistically and quickly than ever before.   

Working with organisations – from scholars and researchers to governments, and civil society organisations, as well as stateless communities – is critical to ensure that our activities remain relevant and useful, and so that our work can benefit from the richness and nuance that is only possible by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. Sustained, flexible funding is integral to this work, and vital to the promise of finally consigning statelessness to history. 

Statelessness affects every facet of a human being’s life and has untold impacts on the communities and countries where it is allowed to persist. Working collaboratively to bring together the expertise and power of advocacy from all sectors of society is absolutely necessary, not only to end statelessness, but to ensure that those who have experienced it, can live fulfilling, dignified and happy lives. 

Radha Govil

Deputy Director, Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness