For people who are stateless or at risk of statelessness, their fragility can shape every part of life
Originally published on Global Voices
Image by Katrin Bolovtsova on Pexels. Free to use under a Pexels License.
This essay was written by Elgene Lutshiti, Palesa Maloisane, and Thandeka Chauke, courtesy of The Global Movement Against Statelessness (GMAS), a content partner of Global Voices. This post is part of Global Voices’ July 2026 Spotlight series, “Statelessness.” This series offers insight into the issue of statelessness and how it hinders people’s freedom of movement, educational opportunities, political access, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.
For many people, citizenship is treated as a fact of life. It sits quietly in the background, represented by a birth certificate, an identity document, a passport, a sense of belonging. But for people affected by statelessness, legal identity is not a background issue. It is the line between inclusion and exclusion, between being able to participate in society and being forced to live in its shadows.
In South Africa, this reality is visible in the lives of many young people who were born and raised in the country, but remain unable to access citizenship or documentation despite legal entitlement. Section 4(3) of the South African Citizenship Act provides a pathway to citizenship for certain people born in South Africa to parents who were neither South African citizens nor permanent residents. On paper, it should offer a route to legal recognition. In practice, many applicants encounter unclear procedures, inconsistent implementation, inordinate delays, missing records and an administrative architecture that, whether by neglect or design, exhausts rather than resolves.
This is where the language of “legal access” must be taken seriously. Access to justice is not only about whether a person can eventually find a lawyer. It is also about whether the law is understandable, whether procedures are accessible, whether officials apply the law consistently, and whether there are meaningful ways to hold the state accountable when rights are denied in practice.
These questions become even more urgent in a shrinking civic space. Across many contexts, civil society organisations and public interest lawyers are operating with fewer resources, heavier administrative burdens, and a political climate increasingly hostile towards marginalised groups.
In South Africa, the Cabinet-approved Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection signals a potentially significant legal restructuring whose implications for statelessness protections remain actively contested, and that contest is occurring precisely when the communities and organisations equipped to monitor it have the least capacity to do so.
A narrow legal response is, therefore, not enough. Statelessness and citizenship exclusion require a legal ecosystem.
That ecosystem begins at community level. People affected by statelessness are often the first to understand how the system fails — which offices turn people away, which documents are demanded without legal basis, which barriers repeat across generations, and what sustainable responses look like. Building a legal ecosystem means creating structures where that knowledge leads, and affected communities are treated as co-strategists, not passive beneficiaries. This Is Home, a collective of young South Africans living with barriers to citizenship, models this approach: through storytelling, organising, and advocacy, the collective ensures that lived experience informs both legal reform and public understanding: not as a supplement to strategy, but as its foundation.
Legal clinics and civil society organisations are often the first point of contact for people who have been turned away by government offices or who do not know whether the law protects them. They translate complex legal rules into practical advice, build trust in communities where formal systems have caused harm, and, critically, identify patterns across individual cases that reveal when a personal problem is also a systemic one. It is at that point that broader partnerships become essential.
Private law firms can add a significant layer of support. Pro bono lawyers can help with individual applications, administrative follow-ups, and reviews, freeing up civil society capacity for deeper systemic work. Where clinics identify a pattern that requires structural intervention, private sector partners can bring the resources for strategic litigation, research, and drafting. But the value of private-sector pro bono is not simply the number of hours donated. Its value lies in whether that support strengthens existing community and civil society work.
In a shrinking civil space, the visibility that movements and affected communities require is built on a reliable infrastructure and ecosystem of support and international solidarity: an ecosystem of durable referral systems, shared resources and meaningful connection across borders to amplify advocacy and develop regional responses to critical human rights issues. Strategic litigation can be an important tool in this ecosystem, but it should not be mistaken for the whole strategy. Litigation can expose unlawful administrative practices, compel decision-making, clarify legal obligations and secure remedies for individuals and groups. But court orders do not implement themselves. A judgment may create a legal opening, but sustained work is often needed to ensure that officials change their practices, that affected people know their rights, that future applicants can access the procedure, and that the state remains accountable after the case ends.
This is particularly important in citizenship and documentation matters, where exclusion is often produced through bureaucracy rather than a single act. A person may not receive a formal refusal. They may simply be told to come back later, to bring additional documents that are not required, to wait for an unspecified decision, or to resolve a problem in an internal system they cannot access. These forms of administrative opacity are difficult to challenge because they are slow, technical and exhausting. They are also deeply harmful. It is precisely because exclusion operates this way, incrementally and bureaucratically and out of reach, that no single actor in the ecosystem can address it alone. The lesson from South Africa’s Section 4(3) context is not only that citizenship laws must be properly implemented. It is that legal entitlement does not automatically produce legal recognition. A right that cannot be accessed in practice remains fragile. For people who are stateless or at risk of statelessness, that fragility can shape every part of life.
In a shrinking civic space, this fragility deepens. Durable ecosystems of support are not a supplement to legal strategy; they are the strategy, from community to clinic to court and back again. Building them asks civil society and law firms to collaborate with care. It asks lawyers to listen before they lead. And it asks all of us to understand that this is not only a technical legal project. It is a project of recognition, belonging, and accountability, one in which the people most affected are not merely rights holders to be assisted, but partners whose leadership must shape every part of the response.
Palesa Maloisane is a human rights and public interest attorney at Lawyers for Human Rights based in Johannesburg, South Africa who has done extensive work surrounding constitutional and administrative law including, nationality rights, statelessness, feminist strategic litigation and gender equality.
Thandeka Chauke is an international human rights lawyer serving as Advocacy Lead for the Global Movement Against Statelessness.
Elgene Lutshiti is a Director at Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr, in their Pro Bono & Human Rights Practice.