Legal Status of Stateless Children in India and Their Right Over Access to Justice

Abstract

Access to justice is one of the most important rights to live a human life with dignity. But such a right is dependent on the legal status of the individual claiming it. Citizenship becomes inevitable for an individual for getting access to justice in matters of gross human rights violations. However, children born out of illegal immigrants in a country might not be able to pursue national citizenship for which they might remain outside the purview of legal recognition as a human being within that country. In India, statelessness has never been addressed adequately as required, for which a lot of conflicts become visible now and then. As regards the rights of stateless children are concerned, similar situations have become evident in India. Although, International Human Rights Laws provide for the universal rights of Nationality to all human beings, yet Indian laws are more or less silent over the issue of the rights of stateless children. The paper, therefore, attempts to address the issues regarding the rights of stateless children in India by analyzing the Principal laws regulating citizenship, case laws decided on statelessness, and case studies on the conditions of few stateless children.