B UNHCR / LHR / D. BOSHOFF eing stateless means having no nationality and no State to provide protection. Sixty years after the adoption of the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, millions of people around the world still do not enjoy the rights, privileges and protection that citizenship of a State brings. At the end of 2012, UNHCR counted 3.3 million stateless persons worldwide. However, many stateless people go unreported - their actual number is likely to be more than 10 million. Most people who are stateless find themselves in that situation through no fault of their own. They may have been excluded when a newly-independent State defined who were – and who were not – its citizens. Some groups were excluded by design, others by accident. Decolonization in Asia and Africa left many people stateless, as did the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Entire communities have been arbitrarily deprived of nationality because of racial or religious discrimination. l l l UNHCR GLOBAL APPEAL 2014-2015 55