A/HRC/38/52 these rights. Some are denied citizenship or formal immigration status at birth or through restrictions on naturalization, while others are subject to collective and individualized withdrawals of citizenship. Sometimes, States produce stateless populations or persons with irregular or inadequate status through administrative barriers that structurally exclude marginalized social or national groups. 8 They use policies and laws that range from outright denial of citizenship to heightened inaccessibility of complicated immigration systems. In either case, the impacts of these direct and indirect mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination are similarly devastating. 11. A State discriminatorily deprives a person of citizenship or immigration status when it withholds or withdraws status on an unreasonable classification such as skin colour, ethnicity, national origin or religion. States have long used access to citizenship and immigration status as a discriminatory tool to curtail the rights and benefits of marginalized groups. Statelessness, for example, has a number of causes, but it is often the result of longstanding discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples and religious groups. In other words, it is often the foreseeable product of discriminatory laws, policies and practices that aim to exclude or have the effect of excluding people who are considered as foreign, often on the basis of their race, colour, descent, ethnicity, national origin or religion.9 It is thus no surprise that according to UNHCR, “more than 75% of the world’s known stateless populations belong to minority groups”. 10 Although some States have renounced explicit discriminatory practices and have adopted fairer-seeming laws and policies, many States continue to permit institutional or indirect discrimination based on race, colour, ethnicity and religion. Similarly, exclusion from citizenship status or from all forms of formal immigration status typically occurs along racial, ethnic, national origin and religious lines, as discussed below. 12. Also discussed below is the importance of an intersectional approach to racial discrimination in the context of citizenship, nationality and immigration laws that accounts for the compounding and differential effects of sex and gender, among other factors. States continue to enforce patriarchal laws that use gender-based discrimination to achieve racial, ethnic and religious exclusion. 13. The present report is organized as follows: section III provides an overview of the applicable international human rights framework. Section IV examines several contemporary manifestations and drivers of racial discrimination in the context of citizenship, nationality and immigration laws, policies and practices. The current section notes that the past decade has seen the escalation of racially discriminatory policies and rhetoric concerning citizenship, nationality and immigration status all over the world. In the past three years in particular, ideologies of racist and xenophobic hatred have been resurgent. As mentioned above, the first aim of the present report is to name and analyse the human rights impact of these ideologies on specific racial, ethnic, national and religious groups. The Special Rapporteur underscores the urgent need for States to condemn explicitly racist and xenophobic practices and policies where citizenship, nationality and immigration laws are concerned. 14. At the same time, the Special Rapporteur aims in the present report to highlight and condemn facially race-neutral policies or rhetoric that nonetheless result in racialized exclusion. This is because States regularly engage in racial discrimination in access to citizenship, nationality or immigration status through policies and rhetoric that make no reference to race, ethnicity or national origin, and that are wrongly presumed to apply equally to all. The Special Rapporteur thus uses the present report to identify and analyse structures and discourses that have the effect of racially discriminating against individuals and groups in their access to citizenship and immigration status, even when States, politicians and general populations ignore or deny the racial impact of these structures and discourses. There 8 9 10 This is particularly the case in situations of protracted or large-scale displacement. See, for example, Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion and Norwegian Refugee Council, “Understanding statelessness in the Syria refugee context”, 2016. Available at www.nrc.no/resources/reports/understanding-statelessness-in-the-syria-refugee-context/. UNHCR finds that “discrimination and exclusion of ethnic, religious or linguistic minority groups often lies at the heart of their statelessness”. See UNHCR, “This is our home”, p. 2. Ibid., p. 1. 5