Microfinance Focus, August 26, 2011: UN refugee agency launches a global campaign to promote action against statelessness on August 25. UNHCR aims to raise awareness with its global campaign about the international legal definition while improving its own methods for gathering data on stateless people.

Antonio Guterres, High Commissioner for Refugees said on August 23 ahead of the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, that “these people are in desperate need of help because they live in a nightmarish legal limbo". He added that "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 groups of people across generations creates great stress in the societies they live in and is sometimes a source of conflict”. UNHCR estimates that there are up to 12 million stateless people in the world today.

To be stateless is tantamount to not being citizens of any country. The legal implication is that stateless people are 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.

Stateless people are stuck in a vicious circle. In cases where the parents are stateless, the children they bore will be stateless as well. Without citizenship, it would be difficult for children to get a formal education and other basic services.

A UNHCR analysis reveals that at least 30 countries have citizenship laws that discriminate against women. For instance in some countries women run the risk of losing their citizenship when they marry foreigners. Also it remains in many countries where the mother cannot pass her nationality to her children. Addressing gender inequality in citizenship laws is a UNHCR goal this year. There have been changes to citizenship laws in Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Kenya and Tunisia that grant men and women the same rights to retain their nationality and pass it on to their children.

However, graver than gender discrimination, is ethnic and racial discrimination in citizenship laws. These are largely politically motivated as in the case of the Muslim Rohingyas of Myanmar, some hill tribes in Thailand and the Bidoon in the Persian Gulf States.

People become stateless due to war and conflict. For example, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Yugoslav federation and Czechoslovakia left many stateless.

The number of states party to the 1961 Convention and the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons is 66 and 38 respectively.

"After 50 years, these Conventions have attracted only a small number of states,'' said Antonio Guterres, High Commissioner for Refugees. "It's shameful that millions of people are living without a nationality – a fundamental human right. The scope of the problem and the dire effects it has on those concerned goes almost unnoticed. We must change that. Governments must act to reduce the overall numbers of stateless."