COMMENTARY STATELESSNESS AND YOUNG CHILDREN AISHA K YOUSAFZAI,* JOAN LOMBARDI,** ERUM MARIAM, TINA HYDER AND ZARLASHT HALAIMZAI  TABLE OF CONTENTS Global Challenges.................................................................................................. 154 Upholding the Rights of the Youngest Children: Why Do the Early Years Matter? ............................................................................................................................... 155 Case Studies of Stateless Young Children ............................................................ 157 A Stateless Children in Greece ..................................................................... 157 B Displacement of Rohingya Children ......................................................... 159 Countering Policy Threats to Shape the Future Narrative on Stateless Young Children ................................................................................................................. 160 GLOBAL CHALLENGES All children deserve to be born with a nationality and identity that protects their rights. Unfortunately, at least 70,000 children who are born in the 20 major reported non-refugee stateless situations are unable to acquire any nationality each year.1 These numbers mask the reality that many more children are impacted by conditions that render them effectively stateless (ie, individuals who have a legal nationality, a state to which they can turn, but no documentation of birth) — a term this commentary has adopted.2 Statelessness in these contexts stems from a range of conditions including, among others, a lack of birth registration, displacement from place of birth or the denial of the right to a national identity where the parents have a different nationality from the place of birth. The number of young children affected by these, and related, conditions is alarming. For example, the United Nations Children’s Fund (‘UNICEF’) reports that one out of four children who are less than five years of age ‘do not officially exist’ because their births have never been officially recorded.3 * Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Boston, United States of America. ** The François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University, United States of America and the Center for Child and Human Development, Georgetown University, United States of America. *** BRAC Institute of Educational Development, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.  Amna (formerly known as Refugee Trauma Initiative), London, United Kingdom.  Amna (formerly known as Refugee Trauma Initiative), London, United Kingdom. 1 UNHCR, Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014–2024 (Report, 2014) 10 (‘UNHCR Global Action Plan’). 2 Personal Communication from Professor Jacqueline Bhabha, Harvard University; H Massey, UNHCR and De Facto Statelessness (Legal and Protection Policy Research Series No LPPR/2010/01, UNHCR, April 2010) 31. 3 ‘Birth Registration’, UNICEF (Web Page, August 2021) <https://data.unicef.org/topic/childprotection/birth-registration/>.