Statelessness

• 1. Introduction

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  Statelessness describes the condition of a person who is "not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law". At the end of 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 4.4 million people worldwide were either stateless or of undetermined nationality. That figure already understates the reality. UNHCR lacks data from at least 22 countries where mass statelessness exists, and the count excludes those who are stateless in practice but carry no legal identity documents at all. The World Bank estimates at least 850 million people fall into that latter category. Who are these people? How do they come to have no country? And what happens when a human being exists outside the recognition of every state on earth?

• 2. How Statelessness Is Made

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  Nationality at birth usually follows one of two principles. Jus soli, or "right of soil", grants citizenship based on where a child is born and is common across the Americas. Jus sanguinis, or "right of blood", grants citizenship based on the nationality of a parent and governs most of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. A child born in a country that uses only jus sanguinis, to parents who have not naturalized, can slip through both systems at once. India, for example, confers nationality only to children born to at least one Indian parent.

  As of 2022, women in 24 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, are legally barred from passing their nationality to their children. When the father is stateless, unknown, or unable to confer citizenship, the child inherits nothing. Algeria amended its nationality code in 2005 to allow either an Algerian mother or father to transmit citizenship, a reform that observers believe may encourage similar changes elsewhere.

  State succession has also produced entire stateless populations at a stroke. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, millions of people found themselves suddenly outside the citizenship frameworks of its successor states. Yugoslavia, East Pakistan, and Ethiopia generated similar displacements. The Council of Europe Convention on the Avoidance of Statelessness in Relation to State Succession is the only treaty targeting this specific problem, and as of the source, only seven states have joined it.

  Perhaps the most overlooked route into statelessness is administrative: missing a deadline, lacking a birth certificate, or failing to pay excessive documentation fees. UNICEF estimated in 2013 that 230 million children under the age of five have not been registered. Registration alone does not confer citizenship, but it creates the documentary link between a child and a state. Without it, proving that link becomes progressively harder over time.

• 3. A Right Without a Keeper

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  In December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established both a right to asylum and a right to nationality. Article 15 expressly prohibited arbitrary deprivation of nationality. That same year, the United Nations Economic and Social Council asked the UN Secretary-General to study the problem of statelessness from scratch.

  In 1954, the UN adopted the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which provided the first internationally accepted definition of a stateless person and set out the rights such persons should enjoy. Seven years later, the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness followed. It entered into force on the 13th of December 1975 and established standards covering how nationality is acquired, voluntarily abandoned, or stripped away by governments.

  For decades, the gap between these instruments and their enforcement was stark. An internal evaluation released in 2001 found that only two individuals at UNHCR headquarters were tasked with statelessness work, and there was no dedicated budget line. A statelessness unit was eventually established in Geneva in 2006. By 2010, an overhaul of UNHCR's budget structure pushed dedicated statelessness funding from roughly US$12 million in 2009 to $69.5 million in 2015.

  By September 2015, the 1954 convention had 86 state parties, up from 65 when UNHCR launched its conventions campaign in 2011. Among the practical results of sustained advocacy: 300,000 Tamils acquired Sri Lankan citizenship, Tajik refugees were naturalized in Kyrgyzstan, and the Czech Republic reduced a large population of stateless persons created when it separated from Slovakia.

• 4. The Bedoon of Kuwait

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  Kuwait holds the largest stateless population in the entire Middle East region. The Bedoon, mostly from the northern tribes and in particular the Al-Muntafiq tribal confederation, were treated as Kuwaiti citizens from 1965 to 1985. During that period they had free access to education, health care, and all other privileges of citizenship. In the 1970s and 1980s, stateless Bedoon constituted 80-90% of the Kuwaiti Army.

  In 1985, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, the government reclassified the Bedoon as illegal residents and denied them citizenship. The official rationale was concern about sectarian loyalties and fears of Iraqi influence inside Kuwait. After an assassination attempt on the emir Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah in 1985, the government hardened further. By 1986, the Bedoon were fully excluded from social and economic rights. Since that year, Kuwait has refused to issue any documentation to the Bedoon, including birth certificates, death certificates, identity cards, marriage certificates, and driving licences.

  A 1995 Human Rights Watch report stated that the totality of the treatment amounted to "a policy of denationalization of native residents, relegating them to an apartheid-like existence in their own country". British MP George Galloway, speaking in the House of Commons, described 150,000 Bedoon as having been driven into refugee camps in the desert near the Iraqi border, "left there to bake and to rot". In 2024, Kuwait revoked the citizenship of 42,000 people in just six months. As recently as 2018, the Kuwaiti government claimed it would naturalize up to 4,000 Bedoon per year, a commitment that human rights observers consider unlikely to be fulfilled.

• 5. Rohingya, Bihari, and Hill Tribes

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  Myanmar's Rohingya people are denied citizenship from birth on the basis that the government considers them racially inferior. Rather than citizenship documents, they receive identification cards that mark them as distinct and do not grant them any of the rights that come with nationality. This has produced an estimated 700,000 stateless persons, contributed to the basis for the Rohingya genocide, and driven an international refugee crisis.

  In Bangladesh, about 300,000-500,000 Bihari people, also known as Stranded Pakistanis, were rendered stateless when Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan in 1971. Bangladesh refused citizenship because of Bihari support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War; Pakistan refused responsibility because it viewed Bangladesh as the successor to East Pakistan and therefore obligated to absorb the Bihari population. Neither side moved, and the Bihari people remained in limbo.

  In Thailand, UNHCR estimated 574,200 stateless people born and living in the country in 2022, up from 443,862 in 2016. Most are from hill tribes or are the children of undocumented migrants from Myanmar. Stateless people in Thailand cannot use government facilities that require an ID card, cannot open a bank account, and cannot own property. A 2008 Thai law offering citizenship to stateless people applies only to those born before the 26th of February 1992, a cutoff that disproportionately excludes younger people.

  The Thai military government adopted a goal of "zero statelessness" by 2024. By 2024, the government was planning pathways to permanent residency and eventual citizenship for stateless residents and their Thai-born children.

• 6. Famous and Forgotten Cases

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  Mehran Karimi Nasseri lived for approximately 18 years in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris after being denied entry to France. His Iranian passport and UN refugee documents had been stolen, and he may have had a British mother but did not hold British citizenship. His situation inspired the 1994 French film Tombés du ciel and the 2004 American film The Terminal.

  Albert Einstein was stateless from January 1896, when at the age of 16 he renounced his Württemberg citizenship to avoid military conscription, until February 1901, when his application for Swiss citizenship was accepted. Self-described "world citizen" Garry Davis chose statelessness voluntarily in the early years of the United Nations. In the United States, Thomas Jolley became stateless during the Vietnam War, and Mike Gogulski renounced his citizenship as a political protest in 2008 without seeking any other.

  The NBA player Enes Kanter found himself effectively stateless after Turkey canceled his passport in 2017, having identified him as a supporter of the Gülen movement following a failed coup attempt. Detained briefly in Romania while traveling, he continued playing in the NBA on a US green card but did not travel with his team to games in London or Toronto in the 2018-19 season because Turkey had requested an Interpol red notice against him. On the 29th of November 2021, he became a naturalized US citizen, changing his name to Enes Kanter Freedom.

  In Taiwan, two Pakistani immigrants applied for naturalization and renounced their Pakistani citizenship as required. During the waiting period, the decisions to permit their naturalization were reversed, leaving them with no citizenship in any country.

• 7. Stateless Nations

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  A stateless nation, in the political science sense, is an ethnic group that does not possess its own sovereign state. The term was coined in 1983 by political scientist Jacques Leruez in his book L'Écosse, une nation sans État, written about Scotland's position within the British state. Scottish scholars including David McCrone, Michael Keating, and T. M. Devine later adopted and spread the term more broadly.

  The Kurds represent one of the most prominent contemporary examples. Estimated at between 30 and 45 million people, the Kurdish population has no recognized sovereign state. Members of a stateless nation are often not personally stateless as individuals, since they frequently hold citizenship in one or more recognized countries. The political condition of the group and the legal condition of the individual are distinct, though the two can intersect when governments strip rights from minority populations, as the case of the Kurds in Syria illustrates: by 2011, close to an estimated 300,000 stateless Kurds were living inside Syrian borders.