Statelessness, Human Rights and Decolonisation

Abstract

Citizenship involves both legal status and lived experience. The Condominium of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) was based on an agreement between France and Britain, which explicitly denied citizenship to the indigenous majority of the archipelago. Indigenous ni-Vanuatu were officially stateless under the terms by which France and Britain jointly governed the New Hebrides from 1906 to 1980. Although forms of citizenship as lived experience were evident in church, custom and profession, its legal absence sharply curtailed the ability of ni-Vanuatu to fully participate as citizens in a full range of civil, social and political rights that citizenship embodies. While limitations on indigenous legal, political and social rights were not unusual in colonial territories up until World War II, the total denial of any form of civil status was. After World War II, the issue of indigenous statelessness in the New Hebrides became more acute, as it contravened the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, constitutional guarantees to citizenship under the Fourth and Fifth French Republics and the principles of the British Nationality Act of 1948. This paper explores statelessness and citizenship in the New Hebrides and argues that the cumulative experiences of statelessness and the limitations that the absence of legal citizenship placed on political and social rights in the New Hebrides were, like land and custom (kastom), vital issues in the decolonisation of Vanuatu.