Hassan Saksa’s life has passed without having a document justifying who he is, where and when he was born. And anyone would think that this survival has been hell: he was used as a mule to transport hashish when he was a child by an alleged adoptive mother who abused him, he lived on the street since he was 11 years old, he dealt with drugs, he has been a drug addict and has entered jail. Six years ago, his existence changed thanks to volunteering for homeless people and now he is a volunteer coordinator of a center of the NGO Mundo Justo. But his day-to-day life is not normal as he is a stateless person, a very rare case in Spain, without any type of rights. For this reason, he wants to achieve Spanish nationality.
“I want to have a life like any Spanish citizen, work and have my own life. I feel very lucky to be in this Mundo Justo family, but I want to move forward alone, not be dependent on someone to buy me some sneakers or for the transport pass. It is humiliating,” Saksa himself says in a conversation with this newspaper.
Saksa believes that he was born around 1958 in Ceuta. With no parents that he knows, his first memories of him come from an orphanage in the Spanish city in North Africa. At five or six years old, he does not know exactly, he was adopted by a Spanish woman of North African origin. Although he believes he was bought. That mother used him to transport hashish in her body from Ceuta to Madrid, because the police did not register the child. “I didn’t have the use of reason to know what he was doing. He used me for her whim. He wasn’t even interested in registering me, educating me, anything. He just beat me up and locked me up. When she needed me, she would take me out of the room and put in a sash what she had to carry,” he remembers bitterly. “When she found out, when she was older, what she had done to me, she was angry and wanted to hurt her. But thank God I never saw her again.”
When he was too old to be a mule, at 11 or 12 years old, his mother never returned for him to an apartment in Malasaña in Madrid. The family he stayed with kicked him out after a few weeks. He then began his ordeal of living on the streets. He slept in cars, in doorways and made a living to feed himself and get clothes. “Sometimes I trusted someone to sleep in a house and they tried to abuse me,” he laments with a serious face.
“When I was old enough to defend myself, I didn’t know how to do anything. Just what she had taught me. “I started dealing and selling hashish to survive.” So she went from living on the streets to ending up in prison at 17 years old. Since then, she has been in prison more than five times and has lived in prison for more than 10 years, adding sentences. “People say that prison is very bad. For me, the opposite. I learned to study, trades and did sports. “I took advantage of the time.” There she was trained in masonry, plumbing, gardening, forklifting, computing, cooking, carpentry, wiring or sheet metal work, among others.
Saksa was addicted to heroin, hashish and cocaine. Until one day he overdosed. “It impacted me a lot. The first thing I did when I left the hospital was call Jorge, a doctor friend. I told him he needed help. “He sent me to a farm in Barcelona,” he says.
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“My life had no meaning. “I didn’t do serious things, just things to survive.” She decided to change. He has been clean of drugs for eight years. He tinkered and worked under the table to survive. “I have five or six diplomas and I have intelligence. I have training, but it is of no use to me. Who’s going to hire me! “I am an ex-criminal and an ex-drug addict.” A doctor sent him to volunteer. There he met Javier García Ugarte, founder of Mundo Justo, a coincidence that changed his life.
Now he is a volunteer coordinator of the center for homeless people that the NGO has in the Prosperidad neighborhood of Madrid and has created four routes to bring food to people who sleep rough in the capital, taking advantage of the fact that he has lived there until recently. world.
No rights
In June 2022, he became the first tenant of the Techô real estate company, which offers its apartments to homeless people. Blanca Hernández, president of that company, believes that Saksa’s story is very painful. “What catches my attention is how wonderful he is despite the life he has led,” she explains alongside him, who was also the first tenant of this initiative. “After all, seeing how affectionate he is, seeing the desire he has to help others and the meaning it gives to his life, that’s why we want to help him.”
Through Hernández, lawyer Arsenio Cores, a human rights expert, has begun to take the Ceutí case. This lawyer explains that Saksa is stateless without being recognized as such by the Administration. Spain is covered by the United Nations statute that regulates statelessness, approved in 1954 in New York. It is common for the Ministry of the Interior to grant this status to Sahrawis in recent years, but the authorities are very restrictive in any other circumstance. The Ceutí is not an immigrant nor is he Spanish. He does not have any nationality or any role that grants him a minimum of rights.
Cores details that in the case of Saksa they could request statelessness from the Asylum and Refuge Office of the Ministry of the Interior, but they have decided to choose another route: request Spanish nationality, because they believe they have sufficient evidence. The main one is that the Spanish authorities have taken him four times to the border with Morocco to expel him and the Alawite kingdom has rejected him for not being a citizen of that country.
Cores has begun processing the paperwork to corroborate at the Moroccan consulate that Saksa is not a citizen of Rabat. “If there is no proof of birth in Morocco, it will be credible that, if the first memory of him is in Ceuta, this man could have been born in Spain. If he is born in Ceuta, the Civil Code says that in the event that a person is born in Spain and the nationality of his parents is unknown, to avoid a situation of statelessness, that person is Spanish,” he justifies. If the route of Spanish citizenship is not achieved, they could request recognition within the status of stateless persons. “What cannot be is that the State allows there to be holes in which people are undocumented and cannot exercise their rights,” Cores complains.
“I want nationality or whatever. What I need is to walk free. A police officer cannot stop me and take me to the police station,” says Saksa. He details that as a man without citizenship or papers he cannot freely go to the doctor, the pharmacy, buy a transportation pass, work, contribute to Social Security, have a bank account or take a long-distance trip. Of course, not voting either. “At the moment, I feel like I’m nobody. It blocks your every right as a human being.”
He dreams that, if he obtains nationality, he wants to travel to the Mundo Justo mission in Ethiopia and to see Pope Francis in Rome with the Lazarus Foundation, like other homeless people and his NGO colleagues do.
In his long life on the street he has used different names and documentation, for which he has been convicted, to, for example, get a room rented to him. For this reason, the Police have different names of Saksa in their file. “I don’t have identification, they don’t know me, but when I did something bad they identified me quickly,” he complains. For this reason, he doesn’t care how they identify him in his nationality request: “I don’t care about the name, as if they call me Paquito. I know what my name is.”
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