The world's 10 million stateless people will be looking to a conference taking place today in New York for respite from a status that leaves them unable fully to take part in the society in which they live or to move to a country where they can.
This is because, while they may live in the same location as their parents and grandparents did before them, they remain unrecognised by the authorities exercising jurisdiction over that location.
The Rohingya people of Burma (Myanmar), for instance, of whom there are 1.3 million, including 140,000 who live in internal displacement camps, remain almost entirely unrecognised by their own government. They are denied citizenship and may not travel freely.
Rohingyas originated in neighbouring Bangladesh but have lived in Burma since the 15th century. Despite this, they remain the subject of sustained and institutionalised discrimination because they are perceived as “other” by a government that refuses to accept them.
Other examples of statelessness may come about because of gender discrimination or a mixture of that and bad luck.
In either eventuality, the person affected has no state that recognises them and therefore cannot get a passport or other documentation essential to function normally, such as a driving licence, or employment papers, and are unlikely to be able to exercise the right to vote.
Commonly, people's nationality is defined in one of two ways, explains Radha Govil, legal officer from the statelessness section in the division of international protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which is organising the New York conference.
“The first is the law of the soil: your nationality is defined by where you are born. So, if you are born in America, you are American. The other is the law of blood, where nationality is descended from the parents,” she says.
However, in 27 countries, women are forbidden from passing nationality to their child. Thus, if the father is dead or has abandoned the mother, the child cannot obtain nationality and therefore does not exist officially.
"This may mean they cannot get a vaccine," says Kate Bodoano, who works in the UNHCR's campaigns section in Geneva. "They can't go on to get an education, marry or vote. Some stateless persons don't even have the dignity of an official burial and a death certificate when they die, because in effect they have not existed."
Govil says: “The predominant cause [of statelessness] is discrimination, usually against a minority group. A lot of people tend to point the finger at Islam but this is not so. Many Islamic countries, Pakistan for example, have done away with this sort of discrimination [against women].”
She attributes the problem to “colonial hangovers” and “political and societal attitudes in some societies that hold women are not entitled to the same rights as men”.
Today’s conference comes 20 years after a similar one in Beijing in 1995 at which countries committed to reform all laws that discriminated against women. Some have, others have not.
While the anomalies and discrimination remain, one child is born stateless every 10 minutes.
