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 The U.S.-born soprano said she had been moved to tears by the
stories told by former stateless people on the second day of the
world's first international forum on statelessness.
Hendricks said it was important for everyone to belong somewhere
and that no one should be "walking around like a ghost".
Stateless people are not recognised as nationals by any country
and deprived of the rights most people take for granted. They
often live on the margins of society where they are vulnerable
to exploitation.
"I want to be the voice of those who really have no voice,"
Hendricks told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the Hague forum
which has brought together 300 experts.
"The solutions will come from the concerned states, but public
opinion plays an enormous role. Politicians usually don't do
things for people who can't vote for them, but public opinion
tends to move them to do things for those people."
The singer said her own experience of growing up in the racially
segregated southern United States in the 1950s had shown her
what it's like to be a second class citizen.
"I was in tears listening to some of the stories (today)," said
Hendricks, who has sung on all the major opera stages in the
world including the Paris Opera and the Metropolitan Opera House
in New York. "Everyone's a human being, and we're all born free
and equal in dignity and in rights – and that's the bottom line
for me."
Srinuan Saokhamnuan, a young Thai woman who spent the first 23
years of her life stateless, told the forum how she had been
constantly rejected and humiliated but had, against the odds,
eventually gained a degree in the United States.
Juliana Deguis Pierre, described a long battle with the
authorities in the Dominican Republic, which has denied
citizenship to some 210,000 people of Haitian descent like her.
CHALLENGE
Hendricks, the U.N. refugee agency's longest-serving goodwill
ambassador, said she had only recently become fully aware of the
magnitude of the stateless problem - an issue which has been
neglected for decades.
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"Ten million people who don't have citizenship somewhere! It was
just unimaginable for me," she said.
Hendricks, now a Swedish citizen, was so moved that she asked to
work on an ambitious U.N. campaign to eradicate statelessness in a
decade, which will launch in November.
But she admitted it would be difficult to raise public awareness.
"It's not sexy and it's going to be tough, but it's just the kind of
challenge that I like," she said.
Countries with large stateless populations include Myanmar, Ivory
Coast, Thailand, Nepal, Kuwait and Russia. Stateless people have
little or no access to education, health or most jobs. Without
citizenship they usually cannot travel, get a driving licence, open
a bank account or even get married.
But Hendricks said a trip to Ivory Coast in June had shown that
change can happen.
"There are people who are willing to change their minds about things
that have been long-held ideas about who is who, and who forms our
nation," she added.
There are an estimated 700,000 stateless people in Ivory Coast where
questions of citizenship helped fuel civil war. Recent legal reforms
allow those with deep roots in the country to apply for nationality.
Hendricks said she had previously planned to visit Myanmar to
discuss the plight of its large stateless Rohingya population with
Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi whom she had met in secret in the
early 1990s when the opposition leader was under house arrest.
However, the trip was judged too risky.
(Editing by Maria Caspani)
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