Today, at least 10 million people around the world are denied a nationality. As a result, they often aren’t allowed to go to school, see a doctor, get a job, open a bank account, buy a house or even get married.
Having a passport or even an officially recognised national identity is not a status that every person on this planet can take for granted.
The UNHCR’s populations of concern database lists 3.24 million stateless persons by their geographical distribution. These reveal some of the major geopolitical hotspots of statelessness in 2016 that are shown in this cartogram. Affected populations include “the more than one million people in Myanmar’s Rakhine state are stateless on the basis of the current citizenship law, […] many of the migrants of Burkinabé descent [in Côte d’Ivoire] who were not eligible for Ivorian nationality after the country’s independence from France in 1960,” and in Europe the ‘Non Citizens’ of Latvia which are a legacy of the former USSR.
