Since the UDHR was adopted 70 years ago, there has been an increasing recognition of the issue of statelessness. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to solve it, and prevent it from occurring in the first place, with the UN Secretary General submitting an annual report on the deprivation of nationality to the General assembly.
Article 14 of the UDHR grants the right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution. This right, in addition to the right to leave one’s own country (Article 13), and the right to nationality (Article 15), can be traced directly to events of the Holocaust. Many countries whose drafters worked on the UDHR were acutely aware that they had turned away Jewish refugees, likely condemning them to death. In addition, many Jews, Roma and others hunted by the Nazis had been unable to leave Germany to save their lives.
Derived from Article 13 are the rights of internally displaced people, which are elaborated more fully in the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. They prohibit arbitrary displacement, and say that internally displaced people (IDPs) “have the right to move freely in and out of camps or other settlements,” a principle that was not respected, for example, in the closed IDP camps for Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.