16.4.2024 Michel Rouleau-Dick, Guest writer
Recently, I travelled from Finland to a non-EU country, flying in and out from Vantaa. At the beginning and end of my trip I had to have a brief chat with a border guard at the airport in Vantaa, and in both cases I got a stamp on my passport and I then proceeded onwards.
While there is nothing particularly ground-breaking about this interaction, it is premised on a very simple fact: that I have a valid passport, issued by my country of nationality. Passports vary in colour and some are more powerful than others, but they are all physical witnesses of the link between an individual and their country of nationality.
For some, however, this link is absent, and they find themselves stateless. That is, they are not considered to be nationals of any state in the world. As a phenomenon, statelessness has long been ignored or under-reported, and it is only relatively recently that awareness-raising and efforts to tackle the issue have been on the agenda. While the exact reason someone may be stateless ranges from conflicts of nationality laws to administrative policies targeted towards certain groups (for example, Rohingyas in Myanmar, Assam in India), there is a clear international legal framework that exists to protect the rights of stateless persons, including two binding international conventions.
The Finnish Nationality Act Reform
Following the election of a new, right-wing Finnish government in 2023, the coalition in power has been pushing for reform of the current Nationality Act and tightening of the requirements to acquire Finnish nationality. This is anticipated to include an increase in the residency requirements for naturalisation from the present five years to eight years, as well as the introduction of a citizenship test.
The Minister of the Interior, Mari Rantanen from the Finns party, justifies this decision by saying that the current legal framework is ‘too lax’ and allows for ‘too easy access to Finnish nationality’. With this in mind, the government led by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo is currently going through the process of pushing this reform through parliament, thereby enacting significant changes to how Finland regulates who can be naturalised and become a Finnish national by application. I will next address the relevance of these changes to the issue of statelessness, and to stateless persons in Finland.
The good
Looking at Finland’s legal commitments towards ending and addressing statelessness, a lot of good things can be said. Finland has ratified both relevant conventions and has enacted relevant legislation to ensure a path to nationality for stateless persons in the country. This includes automatically granting Finnish nationality to a child born in Finland who would otherwise be stateless, as enacted in a 2003 reform of the Finnish Nationality Act.
A corollary obligation under the 1954 Statelessness Convention is the need to ensure access to the convention rights for stateless persons on the territory. The most effective way to do this is to establish a dedicated statelessness determination procedure or SDP. While Finland does not have an SDP, it has a related procedure in place to determine the citizenship status of an individual (current and previous citizenship(s), stateless, or unknown citizenship). This is a good starting point, and it is worth highlighting that Finland has established safeguards in its nationality law to prevent statelessness at a point in time when the issue was not really on the agenda.
Current numbers on statelessness in Finland are not necessarily easy to come by due to the very nature of the phenomenon: stateless persons are often unregistered or not properly included in government numbers due to their lack of a citizenship. In 2021, Finland reported that there were 1,273 persons of unknown nationality in the country. I should note here that the accuracy of this number is limited on one hand since “unknown nationality” does not necessarily mean that a person is stateless. Statelessness is also generally under-reported.
On the positive side of the reform proposed by the Orpo government, and perhaps as a testimony to the increasing awareness on statelessness, stateless persons would be exempted from the increase in residency requirements from five to eight years. The removal of a previous distinction between voluntary and involuntary statelessness is also a welcome step.
The bad
Things get more complicated once we start looking more closely at what Finland has in place to address statelessness. Yes, Finland has a procedure to determine nationality, but it does not have a dedicated statelessness determination procedure. The primary purpose of nationality determination is not to identify and determine statelessness, but to assess acquisition or loss of Finnish nationality (as per Section 36 (1) of the current Nationality Act). Under the nationality determination procedure, the burden of proof to assess statelessness or nationality is largely on the applicant. A UNHCR report also highlighted the need to have at least the possibility of an oral hearing, and it also criticised the paperwork-intensive nature of the current procedure. We can thus question to what extent the current framework fulfils Finland’s international commitments on statelessness.
These measures may have been seen as a step in the right direction a decade ago, but Finland’s shortcomings on statelessness have been highlighted repeatedly at the international level (UN), both in the context of the Universal Periodic Review (most recently in 2016 and 2022) and by the UNHCR. It is fair to expect Finland, a country that prides itself on promoting human rights, to do better when presented with the opportunity to address statelessness.
The ugly
Unfortunately, the proposed reform of the Nationality Act in its current form is likely to compound issues faced by stateless persons in Finland. Without a dedicated formal statelessness determination procedure, Finland still lacks the proper tools to identify stateless persons and ensure their access to the rights guaranteed to them under the 1954 Convention.
Because of the lack of a mechanism to identify and determine who is stateless on the territory, stateless persons who manage to acquire residence status in Finland may not be able to benefit from the reduction in residence requirements for stateless persons to naturalise. This means they would need to experience an additional three years of statelessness before qualifying for Finnish nationality. This is particularly an issue for stateless refugees, given the tightening of the Nationality Act in relation to beneficiaries of international protection; if a refugee’s statelessness hasn’t been recognised, they will have to wait longer to naturalise and access Finnish nationality. Being stateless means severe limitations to one’s rights, limitations that a residence permit can help mitigate but not solve entirely. The experiences of stateless persons show the mental toll taken by existing in this legal limbo, and being stateless severely hampers one’s ability to lead a normal life.
The ongoing effort to reform the Nationality Act cannot be isolated from the turn inwards by the right-wing Orpo government, its focus on deterrence and securitisation, as well as the growing calls for “tougher” laws on immigration. The minister of the interior has been vocal in highlighting the nationalist focus of the reform, and we know from other contexts that such tendencies rarely go well for those in more vulnerable circumstances.
Statelessness is avoidable, and the only real, lasting, remedy is access to a nationality. While the aim of the current reform is not to end statelessness, the opportunity to bring Finland in compliance with its international commitments should not be lost. A lack of awareness about statelessness risks heightening further the shortcomings of Finland’s legal framework on the issue. After all, one of the explicit goals of the Nationality Act (Section 1(2)) is to prevent and reduce statelessness.
Another version of this blog is published on the European Network on Statelessness blog. The author would like to thank the editorial team of both blogs of for their comments and insights.
Photograph used in image: Henry Thong Unsplash
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