Statelessness is another term for people without citizenship. International law seeks to ensure that every person has a nationality. Being a citizen of a country basically means you are content with the social rules that the country has and built upon.
There are therefore likely to be more than 15 million stateless persons worldwide today when all results are tallied up. It's a big number considering that it contains few countries including (sub-Saharan) Africa, Europe, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), America, Asia and the Pacific, and Palestine. Well, not all countries of the world are able to report data on statelessness. 97.6% of the number of stateless persons reported globally can be found in just 20 countries, which each is home to a stateless population of over 10,000
For Asia and the Pacific, reports a total of 1,422,850 persons under its statelessness mandate in Asia. It may be far higher if, indeed, there are widespread problems of statelessness in India, Indonesia, Nepal, and Pakistan, as some of the available information suggests there might be.
In contrast, the Americas currently report the lowest number of stateless persons (at just over 200,000) and are indisputably the region with the fewest people affected by statelessness.
In (sub-Saharan) Africa, a current total of 721,303 stateless persons is reported. It appears safe to conclude that, in Africa, statelessness is likely to actually affect more than double the number of persons currently accounted and probably many more.
By comparison, statelessness is more comprehensively mapped in Europe than any other region. The total figure reported is 670,828, some 85% of whom can be found in just four countries (Latvia, the Russian Federation, Estonia, and Ukraine) – in all cases as a product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a total of 444,237 persons under its statelessness was mandated. This report also canvases the world’s most significant stateless refugee populations, including for instance Black Mauritanians, Faili Kurds, stateless Kurds from Syria and Rohingya refugees.
The 3.5 million figure from collated global statistics on statelessness significantly underrepresents the scale of the problem. We found conservative estimates in other sources that would account for an additional approximately 2.5 million stateless persons. There are also approximately 2.1 million persons of Palestinian origin, who were never displaced from the West Bank or Gaza Strip and whose nationality status remains ambiguous in the absence of Palestinian nationality regulations. Furthermore, there are also at least 1.5 million stateless refugees and around 3.5 million stateless refugees from Palestine. When this is all tallied up, there are therefore likely to be more than 15 million stateless persons worldwide today.
Why are these people stateless or without citizenship?
There are a variety of circumstances that give rise to statelessness at birth or in later life, and this section highlights some of the most common causes.
Conflict of Nationality Laws
State Succession
Legacy of Colonisation
Arbitrary deprivation of Nationality
Administrative Barriers and Lack of Documentation
The Inheritance of Statelessness
The message that not ‘just’ 10 million, but more than 15 million people are affected by statelessness globally certainly helps to add weight to the argument that this is a widespread international phenomenon which demands our attention. As already mentioned earlier in this report, in terms of international issues: if size matters, statelessness matters. Indeed, if all stateless persons were to be counted together as a single ‘country’ group, it would come in as the 70th largest. But size is not the only reason that statelessness matters. There are other, perhaps, even more, pressing reasons, such as the undeniable reality that statelessness is an entirely man-made problem, making it both our collective responsibility but also within our collective power to resolve.
