A new world-first legal database has been created to help stateless people achieve positive human rights outcomes, including residency and citizenship.

The ‘Global Caselaw Database on Statelessness’ has been established by Melbourne University’s Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness to strengthen access to legal recourse on issues of nationality, statelessness, and related human rights issues.

The database provides a practical resource for lawyers, academics, advocates, and decision-makers by bringing together decisions, case notes and  from courts and tribunals across different jurisdictions across the world.

It covers judgments that address statelessness directly, such as where the applicant is stateless or at risk of statelessness.

The 100-case database is an evolving tool, and new cases will be added incrementally. It was created with the support of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, the European Network on Statelessness and law firm Mallesons.

Deputy Director of the Centre and one of the architects of the Database, Radha Govil, said the database provides a much-needed resource for people working in the statelessness area.

Speaking at the launch of the database, Associate Professor Govil said: “Although litigation has not been used as extensively as one would think, legal challenges to statelessness in courts have been critical to overturning decades-long statelessness for significant groups around the world over a long period of time and in vastly different contexts”.

“By creating an accessible repository of the most significant cases on statelessness from around the world, our aim is to increase the capacity and expertise of lawyers, advocates, decision-makers, scholars and affected communities to bring real change to the lives of stateless people,” she said.

Professor Govil told the launch event that the database in based on the 1954 convention on the status of stateless people and other international human rights declarations,” 

One of the key cases on the database is known as ‘NZYQ’.

In the case, Australia’s High Court ruled that detention was a form of punishment and can usually only be inflicted on a person by a court once they are found guilty of a crime. 

The court held that a law authorising administrative detention of a non-citizen by the executive government would only be constitutionally valid if it was reasonably necessary for a legitimate non-punitive purpose.

Ultimately, the court held that the law authorising detention of the plaintiff was not adapted to the purpose of his removal, in circumstances where there was ‘no real prospect of removal from Australia becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future’.

Stateless people do not have a nationality, which means they are not recognised as ‘belonging’ to any country.

Currently, more than four million people around the world are stateless, most of them in the Asia Pacific, and all of them vulnerable to discrimination and exploitation.

Read more here: Global Caselaw Database on Statelessness