A stateless person is an individual who is not a citizen of any state under the laws of that state," according to the Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons from 1954. (Note that the original text uses 'nationality' and not 'citizenship'. However, in many countries and contexts these terms do not mean the same, as 'nationality' often refers to ethnicity, affiliation, etc., while 'citizenship' primarily is a legal term.)
Statelessness can have many causes, such as lack of documentation of country of birth and parents, various forms of discrimination, creation of new states and dissolution of old ones. Statelessness can also be due to the legislation of a country. For example, citizens of some countries will lose their citizenship if they are away from the country for more than a certain number of years. In Norway and many other countries, most stateless people come to the country as refugees. In addition, a few were born here to stateless parents. But in many other countries, for example in Estonia, Myanmar and the Ivory Coast, most stateless people are not immigrants, but born and raised in the country.
The High Commissioner for Refugees(UNHCR) is committed to provide vital protection and assistance to refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced and stateless people. The organization has adopted an action plan to end statelessness within ten years (UNHCR 2014).
How can statelessness be measured?
In Norway, the other Nordic countries, and a few other nations, the primary sources of information on statelessness are the immigration authorities and the population register, as described in the article "Statelessness in Norway".
However, most countries in the world do not have such registers, and other data sources must therefore be used to obtain information on statelessness. The most common source is censuses, which collect information on the entire population, including small population groups. However, censuses are conducted relatively infrequently, usually only every ten years, so they cannot regularly provide updated figures on the number of stateless individuals. They are also not well-suited for thoroughly mapping citizenship, partly because they only record self-declared citizenship, which is a subjective concept and not always well understood.
Another important source of data on statelessness is interview surveys, either of a random sample of the population or only of stateless persons and their families. However, stateless persons often live scattered and are relatively few, so that only a few will be captured in a random national sample.
Many citizens, especially in poor countries, do not know what citizenship is and many are unsure of their own citizenship. Some residents may also have a different opinion about their citizenship than the authorities have, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar. Moreover, the definition of citizenship varies from country to country.
The author of this article, together with colleague Sadiq Kwesi Boateng, has contributed to interview surveys of two groups of stateless people in Kenya, the Pemba (originally immigrated from Tanzania) (Boateng, Brunborg and Munaita 2020) and the Shona (originally from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe) (UNHCR 2020). The surveys, which were carried out by UNHCR Kenya in collaboration with the Kenyan Bureau of Statistics, have inspired the Kenyan government to make it easier for stateless persons to apply for and obtain Kenyan citizenship, so that they have the same access to education, health services and work etc., as Kenyan citizens.
How many stateless people are there in the world?
A few years ago, UNHCR stated that there were approximately ten million stateless individuals worldwide (UNHCR 2014, 2016a, b). However, due to the poor quality of the data, UNHCR now only asserts that there are "millions of stateless people worldwide." By the end of 2022, UNHCR had figures for 4.4 million stateless individuals in 95 countries but noted that the correct global number is estimated to be significantly higher. This is partly because there are stateless individuals in many countries without statistics on statelessness. For a few countries, the numbers are reliable, especially for those with good registries or censuses, but for many countries, the estimates are rather loose, such as 17,000 in Kenya and 931,000 in Ivory Coast. Globally, 30 percent of stateless individuals are refugees, meaning that the majority of stateless people are not refugees.
In several regions with significant population displacements due to armed conflict, there are many stateless individuals. In Myanmar, UNHCR estimates that there are at least 600,000 stateless individuals. Moreover, there are nearly 1 million stateless refugees in Bangladesh, most of them from Myanmar. In Thailand, there are 567,000 stateless individuals, many of them from neighbouring countries. In Europe, at the end of 2022, around half a million stateless individuals and persons with undocumented citizenship were registered, with the highest numbers in the former Soviet republics of Latvia (187,000), Estonia (68,000), and Russia (95,000). In the rest of Europe, Sweden (21,000) and Germany (20,000) had the highest number of stateless individuals, as shown in Table 1.
Since the start of the campaign in 2014, 517,500 stateless individuals, including those with undetermined nationality, have acquired citizenship, according to UNHCR. "By the end of 2021, this group (in situ stateless) comprised more than three million, or 71 percent of all reported stateless individuals. Stateless refugees and asylum seekers make up 1.1 million people, or 25 percent of the reported global stateless population. In addition, there are an additional 150,500 stateless internally displaced persons."
| Antall personer | |
|---|---|
| Bangladesh | 952.309 |
| Elfenbenskysten | 931 076 |
| Thailand | 573 898 |
| Myanmar | 473 440 |
| Latvia | 187 404 |
| Syria | 160 000 |
| Russland | 95 161 |
| Kuwait | 92 000 |
| Kambodsja | 75 000 |
| Saudi-Arabia | 70 000 |
| Estland | 68 101 |
| Uganda | 67 002 |
| Irak | 47 093 |
| 1The figure for Bangladesh includes forcibly displaced stateless persons from Myanmar. |
International recommendations on statistics on refugees, internally displaced persons and stateless persons
UNHCR is committed to gaining a better understanding of statelessness worldwide, addressing aspects such as the scope, background of stateless individuals (birth country, age, gender, occupation, education), reasons for statelessness, duration of statelessness, the challenges they face, the process of acquiring citizenship in the country of residence, and practical criteria defining a person as stateless in a given country (such as the lack of an ID card). Therefore, the High Commissioner has initiated efforts to develop and enhance statistics related to refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and stateless individuals—these being the three primary groups UNHCR is tasked with protecting. This initiative stems from a growing concern regarding the lack of harmonization in definitions, classifications, and data collection methods for refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and stateless individuals. Statistics for these groups are often of poor quality, relying on diverse data sources and methods, frequently ad hoc and non-standardized.
Statistics Norway has been heavily involved in this. The work started in 2014, when Statistics Norway and UNCHR jointly wrote a report on statistics on refugee statistics, which was presented to the UNSC (United Nations Statistical Commission) in March 2015. In 2016, an expert group was established to prepare recommendations on refugee statistics and a handbook for the preparation of refugee statistics, with instructions on how to collect refugee statistics. This group was given the acronym EGRIS (Expert Group on Refugee and Internally Displaced Persons Statistics), of which Statistics Norway has been an active member. The UNSC adopted the International Recommendations on Refugee Statistics (IRRS) in March 2018. In 2020, the UNSC adopted the Technical Report on Internally Displaced Persons Statistics (IRIS): "an overview of existing approaches to the collection of IDP statistics and statistical quality issues".
In 2021, the mandate of the group was expanded to include the development of International Recommendations on Statelessness Statistics (IROSS) and an additional 'S' was added to the acronym for the group (EGRISS). Like IRRS and IRIS, IROSS is being developed in collaboration with a subgroup of affected countries and international experts, in which Statistics Norway is involved. The expert group EGRISS has grown and now consists of members from 55 national authorities and 35 regional and international organisations, which shows the great interest in this topic. Reports from EGRISS on statelessness were presented to the UN Statistical Commission at the meetings in 2022 and 2023 (EGRISS 2023).
The Commission noted the challenges in collecting data on stateless populations, due to the countries' specific characteristics related to national laws, guidelines and regulations that determine citizenship, and emphasized that the operationalization of concepts and definitions will require more work. Furthermore, the Commission emphasized the need to help countries with capacity building for harmonized reporting on statelessness statistics.
The recommendations indicate that three groups fall under the proposal for a statistical framework for statelessness:
- Stateless individuals, i.e., persons without nationality/citizenship in any country.
- Individuals with undetermined nationality, i.e., persons lacking evidence of their citizenship.
- Statelessness-related individuals, meaning those who have been stateless, have one or more stateless parents, or live in a household with at least one stateless person.
For each of these groups, it is recommended to compile statistics on the number of individuals born in the country they reside in, and the number born in other countries (UNHCR 2018). This categorization is useful because the path to citizenship in a country often depends on the country of birth and the migration history.
Statistics Norway (SSB) can produce Norwegian statistics for most of these categories, as demonstrated in the article Statelessness in Norway, particularly for group a). However, the statistics we can generate have some limitations. The primary problem is the frequent lack of information about parents and grandparents for individuals born abroad and who arrived in Norway as adults.
In group b), there are very few individuals in Norway. At the beginning of 2024, only 55 individuals were recorded with unknown citizenship. However, this does ot necessarily mean that their citizenship is undetermined since most or all of these cases likely result from missing data or errors.
Compiling statistics for group c) is the most challenging, as it requires current and retrospective data for the entire population, including data on household and cohabitation. Unlike some other countries, there are few or no consequences for stateless residents in Norway if they live or have lived with a stateless person, so such statistics are not crucial here. However, in principle, we can create tables on this as well.
References
Boateng, SK, H Brunborg and WL Munaita (2020): “Measuring statelessness in Kenya: A Study of the Pemba.” Report not yet published by UNHCR.
EGRIS (Expert Group on Refugee and Internally Displaced Persons Statistics) (2018): International Recommendations on Refugee Statistics (IRRS). https://egrisstats.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/International-Recommendations-on-Refugee-Statistics.pdf
EGRISS (Expert Group on Refugee, Internally Displaced Persons and Statelessness Statistics) (2023): International Recommendations on Statelessness Statistics (IROSS). https://unstats.un.org/UNSDWebsite/statcom/session_54/documents/BG-4e-EGRISS-IROSS-E.pdf
Statsborgerloven (2005): Lov om norsk statsborgerskap (statsborgerloven). Hentet fra https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/2005-06-10-51/KAPITTEL_3#KAPITTEL_3
United Nations (1954): Convention related to the status of stateless persons. http://www.unhcr.org/protection/statelessness/3bbb25729/convention-relating-status-stateless-persons.html
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UNHCR [United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees] (2014): Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014-2024, http://www.unhcr.org/protection/statelessness/54621bf49/global-action-plan-end-statelessness-2014-2024.html?query=global
UNHCR. [United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees] (2015): Mapping Statelessness in Norway, http://www.refworld.org/docid/5653140d4.html
UNHCR. (2016a). Statelessness Around the World, http:// www.unhcr.org/statelessness-around-the-world.htm
UNHCR (2020): Understanding the Socioeconomic Conditions of the Stateless Shona Community in Kenya. Results from the 2019 Socioeconomic Survey. https://reliefweb.int/report/kenya/understanding-socioeconomic-conditions-stateless-shona-community-kenya
UNHCR (2023): Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2022. Copenhagen.
Utenriksdepartementet (2019): Norges tillegg til rapporten til FNs menneskerettighetsråds arbeidsgruppe for de periodiske landhøringene (UPR). http://www.udiregelverk.no/no/rettskilder/internasjonale-konvensjonerog-avtaler/1954-09-28/
