Introduction The numbers involved are staggering. According to the latest estimates available, the number of migrants globally was over 244 million in 2015. In the same year, there were roughly 65 million forcibly displaced people, a figure that included over 21 million refugees, 3 million asylum seekers, and more than 40 million internally displaced persons.9 By 2018, the number of refugees worldwide had increased to 25.9 million, with half of them under the age of 18. Four fifths of all the refugees live in countries neighbouring their own, and this phenomenon is true for South Asia as well. South Asia is home to 2.6 million migrants—10 per cent of the world’s total. Of these 2.6 million, Pakistan hosts 54 per cent and Bangladesh 35 per cent.10 Perhaps the most vulnerable are people who are known as the stateless. As defined by the UN, a stateless person is one ‘who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’.11 She may be a refugee having fled persecution in one state, but not recognised by the host country; denied citizenship in her country of birth, because the state does not recognise her;12 or simply an undocumented person, without formal recognition in her own country. Common to these pathways is the active denial of nationality to specific groups, since the right to nationality is essential to facilitating the actualisation of all other fundamental human rights. While international law provides that all persons have the right to a nationality, states still retain the right to determine how nationality is acquired.13 session, (New York: United Nations General Assembly, 2016) https://reliefweb. int/report/world/new-york-declaration-refugees-and-migrants-draft-resolutionreferred-high-level-plenary. 9 Ibid. 10 ‘About Us: Figures at a Glance,’ United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, accessed February 11, 2020, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-aglance.html. 11 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, (Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1954) https://www.unhcr.org/en-lk/protection/statelessness/3bbb25729/ convention-relating-status-stateless-persons.html. 12 This includes the refusal to recognise the offspring of female citizens and their foreign spouses as citizens, a category in which lies Nepal, the only such South Asian country. 13 Asha Bangar, ‘Statelessness in India: Statelessness Working Paper Series’(Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, 2017), accessed February 25, 2020, http://www.institutesi.org/WP2017_02.pdf. xxvii