the urgent need to protect stateless children’s rights Stateless children – who are they? There are an estimated six million stateless children around the world1 – children without a nationality who don’t belong to any country – whose lives are insecure and futures uncertain. Many stateless children are denied access to education and health care. They are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, including being trafficked, forced into hazardous labour and sexual exploitation, locked up alongside adults and deported. Addressing statelessness is a vital step towards ensuring that millions of children can escape the cycle of marginalization and claim their rights to build better futures. Yet, despite these dangers and the risks that stateless children face, few international or national child protection systems include stateless children in their programming. This needs to change. Birth registration and statelessness Birth registration is fundamental for acquiring nationality because it documents where a person was born and who a person’s parents are. Most children without birth registration are not stateless. But where children are born in circumstances that might cause statelessness – such as born to mixed parentage, born in a migratory setting, born to ethnic or other marginalized minorities denied citizenship, or born in border areas – lack of birth registration can result in statelessness. What is nationality and statelessness? Nationality is a legal bond between an individual and a State. States normally grant nationality either through descent, whereby children acquire the nationality of their parents ( jus sanguinis), or through a child’s birth on a country’s territory ( jus soli). Most countries grant nationality by a combination of both birth and descent. A stateless person is someone who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. While there are pockets of stateless people throughout the world, statelessness is particularly acute in south east and central Asia, eastern Europe, the Middle East and some countries in Africa. Most countries in the Americas grant citizenship to anyone born on their territory, so the region has the lowest incidence of statelessness. 5