Stateless People From http://www.unhcr.org/basics/BASICS/452611862.pdf A stateless person is someone who, under national laws, does not enjoy citizenship – the legal bond between a state and an individual – with any country. Article 1 of the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons spells out the legal definition, indicating that someone who is not a national of any state under relevant laws is therefore stateless. As the issue is politically delicate in many affected countries and often viewed as a private, internal problem, many governments have not made accurate counts of their stateless populations and an overall figure is difficult to conclude. However, recent research suggests there may be around 11 million people globally without a country to call their own. While the plight of vulnerable groups of refugees and so-called internally displace people is well documented, the stateless – “non-persons, legal ghosts” according to one expert – receive far less attention and are generally less understood. Statelessness can have various causes. One can either be born to stateless parents or becoming stateless later in his or her life. Becoming stateless can be due to arbitrary deprivation of citizenship often on the basis of ethnic or other group affiliation or to being a victim to transfer of territory or sovereignty which alters the nationality status of some citizens of the former state(s), leaving them without citizenship. Other reasons for lack of citizenship may have to do with administrative or procedural problems, misunderstandings or conflicts of law, individual renunciation of one nationality without first acquiring another, failure to register children at birth so there is no proof of where or to whom they were born, and automatic alteration of nationality in the case of marriage, or the dissolution of a marriage, between couples from different countries. Throughout the years, the UN has tried to overcome the problem of statelessness through international treaties, such as the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Other treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, refer to the case of stateless people indirectly by underlines that “Everyone has the right to a nationality.” However, international support for the treaties on stateless people has been lethargic and needs to be strengthened. Fifty-nine nations are party to the 1954 Convention and just 31 to the 1961 Convention compared to the 146 countries that have acceded to the 1951 Refugee Convention and/or its 1967 Protocol. Because refugee and statelessness problems sometimes overlap and may be interdependent, UNHCR has been designated by the UN General Assembly to effectively become the overseer and guardian of the world’s stateless people and the various efforts to help them. In accordance with Article 11 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, UNHCR provides assistance to individuals by helping them to resolve their legal problems, obtain relevant documents and eventually restart their lives. In 2003, UNHCR conducted an ambitious global survey aimed for the first time to construct a comprehensive picture of statelessness. One of the interesting findings of the UNHCR research was that the displacement of stateless people may act as an early warning of larger refugee exoduses, thus unless the problems of the stateless are identified and addressed, effective solutions to refugee problems may be severely hampered.