1. Discriminatory Nationality Laws
As outlined in the Myanmar chapter, the statelessness of the Rohingya community is largely caused by ethnic discrimination embedded in the citizenship laws of Myanmar. Urdu-speaking ‘Bihari’ communities were excluded from accession to Bangladeshi citizenship until court intervention in 2008 due to discriminatory interpretations of the citizenship law. Conceptions of the Urdu-Speaking community as owing allegiance to or ‘belonging’ to Pakistan led to their denial of rights under amendments to the Bangladeshi citizenship laws that were introduced in 1978.
While 2009 amendments to The Citizenship Act removed the gender discriminatory provisions which denied women the equal right to pass citizenship to their children, the Act still contains provisions which deny women the equal right to confer citizenship to a foreign spouse. The Act contains a provision allowing foreign women married to a Bangladeshi man to apply for naturalized citizenship through a simplified process, yet there is no such provision allowing the same for foreign men married to Bangladeshi women. In particular, due to the government banning marriages between Rohingyas and citizens, their marriages as a result are unregistered, potentially leaving their children open to statelessness.
2. Lack of Legal Safeguards Against Childhood Statelessness
On the face of the law, the jus soli provision of Bangladeshi citizenship law would provide foundling children and children born to stateless parents access to citizenship. However, due to lack of implementation of Bangladesh’s jus soli provisions, citizenship is predominantly only gained via descent as children born in Bangladesh are typically only granted citizenship if they have at least one Bangladeshi citizen parent.
3. Administrative Barriers
Administrative and policy practices have led to the citizenship laws of Bangladesh shifting in application from jus soli to jus sanguinis in their application. While the majority of stateless persons in Bangladesh are Rohingyas whose stateless status was gained before their arrival in Bangladesh, it is this ‘paradigmatic policy shift’ that has compounded intergenerational statelessness among their children born in the country. In 2020, it was estimated that more than 75,000 Rohingya children had been born in the Cox’s Bazaar Refugee camp since 2017. In April 2022, it was reported that an official count found that on average 95 children were born per day to Rohingya parents in refugee camps, accounting for this, an additional 70,000 stateless children may have been born in Bangladesh in the past two years.
Bangladesh’s birth registration rate was reported as 56% as of 2019, increasing to just 58% in 2022. Innovations to the CRVS model in 2021 contributed to increasing the birth registration rate to 83% in the first quarter of 2023. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has noted that women and children in the Rohingya community experience lower rates of birth registration, placing them at risk of statelessness. Local private entrepreneurs involved in the data entry process have been reported to charge informal fees for facilitating the data entry of an application for registration.
