No state, no rights, the plight of 12 million people who don’t exist

Around the world today there are millions of people who are not recognized as citizens of any country. On paper they don’t exist anywhere. They are people without a nationality. They are stateless.

UNHCR estimates that there are up to 12 million stateless people in the world, but defining exact numbers is hugely problematic. Inconsistent reporting combined with different definitions of statelessness means the true scale of the problem remains elusive.

“These people are in desperate need of help because they live in a nightmarish legal limbo,” says António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. “This makes them some of the most excluded people in the world. Apart from the misery caused to the people themselves, the effect of marginalizing whole groups of people across generations creates great stress in the societies they live in and is sometimes a source of conflict.”

UNHCR has launched a campaign to shed light on this often elusive issue – aimed at decreasing the number of stateless worldwide. The campaign comes just days before the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness on August 30, 2011.

“There are numerous causes of statelessness, many of them entrenched in legalities, but the human consequences can be dramatic”, says UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards. “Because stateless people are technically not citizens of any country, they are often denied basic rights and access to employment, housing, education, and health care. They may not be able to own property, open a bank account, get married legally, or register the birth of a child. Some face long periods of detention, because they cannot prove who they are or where they come from”.

While the full scope of statelessness across the globe is only just becoming known, UNHCR has found the problem is particularly acute in South East Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. However pockets of statelessness exist throughout the world and it's a problem that crosses all borders and walks of life. Listen to Emer McCarthy’s full interview with Adrian Edwards: