THE WORLD’S STATELESS FOREWORD This report is about ordinary people, living all over the world, who have one extraordinary thing in common: they do not hold any nationality at all. They are The World’s Stateless. When having a nationality (or even multiple nationalities) is the norm, it is difficult to picture what statelessness is like. It is difficult to find the right words to describe the absence of something. More often than perhaps we should, those of us who seek to convey the urgency of this issue and the severity of its impact have fallen back on terms like ‘legal ghosts’ and ‘citizens of nowhere’ to try to portray what statelessness means. Such labels may be effective, and even rather poetic, in describing the phenomenon of statelessness. Yet they are also misleading. As, perhaps, is the word ‘stateless’ itself. The more we listen to the experiences of stateless persons around the world, the more we understand about who they are and how they view their own situation, the more we explore the root causes of statelessness and the more we learn of the incredible scale and reach of this problem, the more these terms seem inadequate. Yes, statelessness presents unique challenges to those who it touches. It can trap people in poverty, stigmatise, isolate and disenfranchise. While feeling lost, rejected, unsettled and insecure are sentiments commonly expressed by stateless persons, they should be no more defined – or confined – by their statelessness than you or I by our nationality. These are people with hopes, ambitions, talents, character, identity and in many cases a deep sense of belonging to a community and of having a homeland. To borrow an expression put forward by a leading scholar who has commented on this issue, the stateless are perhaps better described not as ‘citizens of nowhere’ but as ‘unrecognised citizens’.∗1They have a place in this world, a country of their own, but this country does not recognise them as its nationals. This must change, because everyone has the right to a nationality. * M. Gibney, “Statelessness and Citizenship in Ethical and Political Perspective”, A. Edwards and L. van Waas (eds.), Nationality and Statelessness under International Law, Cambridge University Press, 2014. 1