Statelessness Around the World

She arrived to Kyrgyzstan from Tadjikistan, without any valid documents. Her mother-in-law only has an old expired Soviet passport. Her children, born in Kyrgyzstan, do not have their births registered, therefore she cannot claim any social benefits for her children. Being almost illiterate she requires assistance from UNHCR's NGO partners to approach passport registration services and other official institutions to get documents for herself and her children. She admits that often she does not have money for public transport to to the district passport registration office. The only source of income for families like hers is 15-18 hours of hard work in the fields only during spring and summer.

The exact number of stateless people is not known, but UNHCR estimates that there are many millions globally – of which approximately one third are children.

Statelessness may occur for a variety of reasons, including discrimination against particular ethnic or religious groups or on the basis of gender; the emergence of new States and transfers between existing States; and conflict of nationality laws.

Statelessness is often the product of policies that aim to exclude people deemed to be outsiders, notwithstanding their deep ties to a particular country. For example, more than 600,000 people in Myanmar's Rakhine state are stateless on the basis of the current citizenship law, which provides that only members of certain ethnic groups are eligible for citizenship.

In addition, because some 25 States around the world do not allow women to transfer nationality to their children, statelessness can occur where fathers are unknown, missing or deceased.

Areas that have experienced large-scale displacement have also been significantly affected by statelessness. In West Africa, the estimated stateless population in Côte d'Ivoire is 700,000, many of whom were migrants of Burkinabé descent who were not eligible for Ivorian nationality after the country's independence from France in 1960.

Statelessness due to the dissolution of former states also continues to affect many people, including some 600,000 people in Europe alone.

There have been notable examples where, through political will, it has been possible to resolve large protracted situations of statelessness. For example, the case of some 300,000 Urdu-speakers (sometimes referred to as Biharis) was resolved in Bangladesh in 2008. Similarly, the situation of the Brasileirinhos Apatridás, stateless children born to Brazilian parents abroad who were unable to acquire Brazilian nationality unless they went back to live in Brazil, was resolved in 2007. Estonia and Latvia have also both recently taken steps to further facilitate the acquisition of citizenship by those born in Estonia and Latvia to non-citizen parents, which will help ensure that these situations are resolved over time.

Statelessness Around the World

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A Special Report: Ending Statelessness Within 10 years

Global Action Plan to End Statelessness, 2014-2024

Good Practices Paper: Resolving Existing Major Situations of Statelessness

Statelessness documents and reports on Refworld

Statistical Yearbooks