In short
Notes on Podcast Episode: "Young and Stateless"
Podcast Overview Title: The Documentary Podcast Description: This podcast features stories that uncover hidden truths and connect global narratives, highlighting the experiences of individuals around the world.
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Episode Details Episode Title: Young and Stateless Episode Description: Explores the lives of millions who are stateless, focusing on the impact on children and the systemic barriers they face in accessing basic human rights. The dialogue also highlights resilience and activism among stateless youth.
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Key Themes and Discussions
Statelessness Defined
- Concept: Statelessness refers to individuals not recognized as citizens by any state, resulting in a lack of legal existence.
- Statistics: The UNHCR estimates approximately 4.5 million stateless individuals, but experts suggest the true number may range from 10 to 30 million.
- Historical Context: Statelessness often arises from complex national laws, historical events, and issues of gender discrimination.
Human Rights Implications
- Legal Rights: Stateless individuals lack access to education, employment, and healthcare. They often face bureaucratic challenges when trying to prove their status.
- Laws: International treaties like the 1954 Convention require states to protect stateless individuals but implementation varies significantly across countries.
Perspectives of Stateless Individuals
- Personal Stories:
- Christiana Bucallot: Born stateless in Germany, experienced challenges in education and employment due to lack of recognized nationality.
- Mohamed Elias: A Rohingya facing extreme discrimination in Myanmar, emphasizing how nationality is often tied to ethnicity and religion.
- Albert Joffe: A Latvian non-citizen who struggled with job applications and visa issues due to his alien status.
Legal and Bureaucratic Challenges
- Recognition Issues: Stateless individuals often lack the necessary documentation to prove their status, which complicates their ability to access rights.
- Naturalization Processes: Procedures are often convoluted and vary widely between countries, making it difficult for stateless persons to gain citizenship.
Activism and Resilience
- Collective Movements: Stateless individuals are beginning to organize and advocate for their rights, shaping a global movement to combat statelessness.
- Community Building: Forums and networks, such as the Apertied Network, facilitate awareness and solidarity among stateless persons across Europe.
The Role of States
- Political Will: The resolution of statelessness requires significant political commitment from states to recognize and provide nationality to stateless individuals.
- Challenges in Implementation: Many governments are hesitant to address statelessness due to fears of increasing migration or political tensions.
Future Outlook
- Potential for Change: Growing awareness and advocacy efforts may lead to progressive reforms in nationality laws, particularly in regions like Europe and Africa.
- Global Trends: Instances of denationalization, such as in India, highlight the ongoing risks faced by vulnerable populations.
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Key Takeaways
- Statelessness is a complex human rights issue affecting millions, predominantly children.
- The lack of nationality leads to systemic barriers that profoundly impact individuals' lives.
- Advocacy and community solidarity are crucial in the fight for recognition and rights for stateless persons.
- Comprehensive reforms in nationality laws and increased political will are essential to address and resolve statelessness.
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Conclusion This episode sheds light on the often-overlooked plight of stateless individuals, emphasizing their struggles while also showcasing their resilience and efforts to demand recognition and rights. The discourse around statelessness not only highlights personal anecdotes but also calls for collective action and systemic change to ensure that everyone has a nationality and the rights that accompany it.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
0:30Presented by the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:10Statelessness might have been the longest forgotten human rights issue in modern human history. When you're stateless, you're just in complete limbo, in a grey zone. It sometimes means that you lack even a legal existence. You are reduced to something like a legal ghost. There's only one institution in this world that can create statelessness and end statelessness, and that is the state. I wanted to work. I wanted to feed my family. I wanted to get out of this situation. You know, over the years, it becomes frustrating and quite painful. Nationality is something a bit like air. When it's there, when we have it, we don't even realize its existence.
1:56It's natural. When it's missing, it has dramatic consequences. If there are so many of us, why is statelessness then such an isolating experience?
2:10Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Alan Little and this is Young and Stateless. Over the next hour, we're going to hear how not having a nationality, being a citizen of nowhere, gravely impacts your life and what young stateless people are doing to change things. Whenever we go somewhere and we ask questions, how many of the people here are familiar with the topic, there's very few hands that want. My name is Alexis Zivashuk. I'm the founder of Apertried Network. It's a coalition of stateless individuals, stateless organizations and stateless communities in the European Union.
2:50An Apertried is a stateless person, someone who is not considered a national by any state under the operation of its law. So right now we are in Budapest, Hungary, and Apertree Network is running its second edition of Statelessness Awareness Forum, Europe, the first ever international forum that is run by stateless people themselves. Other experts, of course, are also invited. So a stateless person is defined by the 1954 convention relating to the status of stateless persons. There is an international treaty on the status of stateless persons, which was agreed in 1954 in the aftermath of the Second World War.
3:34It requires states to grant protection to stateless people within their borders and to accord them the same rights as refugees, including the right to travel documents and the right to education and work. And the right to have a nationality is not just a nice idea. This is a right which is firmly embedded in international human rights law. My name is Gábor Júlai. I'm Organizational Development Director at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, one of the leading human rights organizations in Central Europe. I'm also the co-founder, previous president, and currently a trustee of the European Network on Statelessness, which is based in London.
4:13I've been working on this topic for nearly 20 years. Today, we know much more about statelessness than we used to know 20 years ago, when we literally didn't know anything. There was no research, there was no mapping, there was no jurisprudence, there were no stateless activists who could tell us what it feels like to be stateless. Roughly, how many stateless people are there? According to the UN Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, currently there are approximately 4.5 million stateless persons in the world who are officially registered as stateless, who have some sort of a proof of their statelessness.
4:50It can be a stateless status. Many European countries offer such a protection status. It can be a residence permit which indicates statelessness. It can be a specific registration for stateless persons. But UNHCR and experts recognize that the actual number is much higher than this. We don't know how many stateless persons there are. probably it would be safe to say that 10, 20, even 30 million stateless people may be around the world. I was shocked the first time I actually read about the numbers. I always thought it was only me and my sisters who were stateless or maybe I had this estimate in my mind of 50 people worldwide.
5:29My name is Christiana Bucallot. I am the initiator and co-founder of State Free. State Free was the first and still is the only organization in Germany that focuses on statelessness. Christiane was born in Germany but inherited statelessness from her West African parents because they lacked the necessary paperwork to prove their nationality. Currently we have a population of over 126 ,000 people who are stateless and without nationality in Germany. The main issue there is that only the minority of those 126 ,000 are even recognized as being stateless. So 29 ,000 are recognized as stateless and 97 ,000 are not.
6:07and those 97 ,000 have even less access to public health service, have less access to school education, have less access to a working permit and they have no option to also opt for naturalisation. So in my case I always was registered with undetermined nationality until I was 25. It's just a very, very precarious situation. A spokesperson for the German government told us People whose nationality is undetermined are not stateless persons. Statelessness can generally be assumed if there are documents to prove it. According to the Convention, statelessness must be certified by one of the signatory states.
6:48In Germany, the travel document for stateless persons constitutes such certification. Every state has a public interest in determining a person's identity and nationality because identity and nationality have far-reaching legal consequences for the person concerned in exercising their fundamental rights. An expedited procedure is intended to facilitate the naturalization of stateless persons. Germany ratified the two conventions on statelessness, so the 1954 convention and the 1961 convention. The theory is that a stateless child born in Germany should be able to acquire citizenship in the first five years.
7:31Main issue with that, in reality, is that to actually have access to this right, that child needs to be recognized as stateless. Problem with that is, in Germany, we don't have a procedure that explains how statelessness can be recognized. The Migration Office says, okay, you need to prove your identity, which means you need to prove your citizenship. How do you prove something that you don't have? Nobody explains the different steps that you need to go and the different things you need to fulfill in order to prove that. A spokesperson for the German government told us, Germany does not have a separate procedure for determining statelessness.
8:11It would not be useful because the individual cases can differ very widely. In some cases, a multi-stage model is applied if the person in question is unable to provide evidence. This model was developed in response to rulings by the federal administrative court and is intended to comply with the principle of favourable consideration, according to Article 34 of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. The aim is to confirm the person's identity in the absence of a passport in a series of steps by examining various other kinds of evidence and documents. We are currently trying to develop a prototype that demonstrates how a digital statelessness determination procedure could look like.
8:53And that's the process we are in. And so say this child that is born in Germany could then be recognized as being stateless, and then with that, this child would be able to naturalize. So my name is Blanca Uyveri, I'm a statelessness expert, and I'm a visiting lecturer at Peter Pazmeng Catholic University in Budapest. States approach the issue statelessness very cautiously for a number of reasons. and one common reason is fears that addressing statelessness could increase migration and could be a pull factor even. Some governments worry that recognizing or protecting stateless populations might encourage cross-border movement and creating, therefore, political or social tensions.
9:43But we shall not forget about also historical reasons, which also play a huge role. So, for example, long-standing citizenship laws, even state succession or entrenched legal traditions sometimes make it difficult to prevent or even resolve statelessness. And in many cases, nationality laws were never designed to be fully inclusive and their amendments can be very sensitive politically. Another factor is that statelessness can be easier to ignore than to address. So therefore governments may deprioritize it in favor of more immediate or even visible issues. Despite these challenges, many states have endorsed international instruments such as the 1954 and the 1961 conventions on statelessness.
10:40Yet the ratification and domestic implementation are unfortunately uneven. And some countries fully integrate these standards into national law, while others adopt selective measures or avoid engagement altogether. So we can see that the global picture is rather mixed. Probably the only region in the world which has a limited phenomenon of statelessness is the Americas. There is one national domestic context, the Dominican Republic, with a significant stateless population. In that continent, the borders didn't really change in the past one or two hundred years. It's also the only region of the world which has a general legal tradition of what is sometimes called the birthright citizenship.
11:24So if you are born in a country, you automatically get the nationality of that country. But in Africa, in Europe, in different parts of Asia, the Middle East, all these regions are significantly affected by statelessness. So when a state either dissolves, merges or gains independence, nationality must be redefined. And if this process is not carefully regulated with clear legal provisions, safeguards and effective administration, then certain groups can remain without a recognized legal bond to any state, which is nationality. So we have seen this in post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav contexts, where transitional citizenship frameworks left thousands in a legal vacuum.
12:11Sometimes it's a very complex legal question where the state may think something really different from what the person thinks or what UNHCR thinks or what NGOs think about the same question. BBC Newsnight, May 1998. In a tiny Baltic state of Latvia, a country which is applied to join the European Union, our Moscow correspondent Alan Little reports. When I worked as the BBC's Moscow correspondent after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I reported on the plight of the large Russian-speaking minority in the newly independent Baltic state of Latvia, many of whom had moved to Latvia from Russia in the Soviet period.
12:53A post-independence citizenship law classed mother-tongue Russian speakers in Latvia as non-citizens.
13:05Go back to where you came from, the man says. There's plenty of room there. You see, the Russian woman says, you can hear for yourself. We're the enemy. It's been the same since Ivan the Terrible, he says. Every time the Russians show up, they bring cold and hunger. A Latvian woman on the right intervenes. No, no, she says, we love the Russians. We love them. Non-citizens can't vote or run for public office. They are barred from certain professions, including the law, the police, the armed forces and government service. Their passports describe them as aliens. I'm a human being. I want to be a man.
13:42I want to live in Latvia, to work for Latvia. It's terrible. I don't know what to do. We know that alien is a monster. In a statement, the Latvian government told us, During the Soviet occupation, following the mass deportations and killings of Latvian nationals, an extensive influx of civilian workforce and military personnel was artificially organised from other republics of the Soviet Union into the territory of Latvia as part of a general Sovietisation and Russification policy, resulting in a large-scale transfer of population to Latvia. The status of a permanently resident non-citizen of Latvia was never intended to be permanent, but rather a transitional solution with a clear path to naturalization.
14:29Non-citizens are not stateless persons. They are Latvian nationals and have passports issued by the Republic of Latvia. Non-citizens of Latvia enjoy the protection of the Latvian state at home and abroad and the domestic authorities have consistently encouraged non-citizens to acquire Latvian citizenship. There are still 170 ,000 Latvian non-citizens today, like Albert Joffe. I was born in August 1992 in independent Latvia. So after this collapse of the Soviet Union, Latvia declared itself not a new state, but the continuation of the Republic of 1918. And the citizenship was granted only to those who were citizens of that first republic and their direct descendants.
15:30And as a result, more than half a million people were denied the right to become Latvian citizens. There's a Latvian term for national that actually encompasses us as well. We've noticed that Latvia recently made that clear, that we are to be regarded as Latvian nationals, but we don't have the citizenship. Alexei, who's hosting the event in Budapest, is also a Latvian non-citizen. Even before Soviet times, to be honest, there were a lot of foreigners coming to fill the economic gaps, but throughout the Soviet Union, it was predominantly coming from countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Central Asia, when the Soviet Union collapsed a lot of these people were temporary and they went back to their countries but the people who were long rooted in the country like my family we don't know how far our roots extend actually because during the two world wars and the strife that happened then the records are not easy to dig up but on my mother's side she's from there because her parents came there when they were young because they had relatives in Latvia The UN Refugee Council describes Latvia's non-citizens as a group of concern that falls within its mandate.
16:49Non-citizens are included in their overall statistics on stateless persons. But they acknowledge that non-citizens enjoy the right to reside in Latvia legally and a set of rights and obligations generally beyond the rights prescribed by the 1954 Convention relating to the status of stateless persons. and as such the non-citizens may currently be considered persons to whom the Convention does not apply. When I finished my school in Latvia I started to look into universities and I wanted to enroll into European Union University. However, due to my status and I was not a European Union citizen there was much higher fees for me to be paid.
17:33and due to this fact I was unable to enroll. Russia, on the other hand, offered the possibility to study free. That's why he went to Moscow. I was granted free education and I also studied as an exchange student in Spain, in Madrid. And unfortunately, really unfortunately, is that in our Latvian non-citizen passports they translated the word nebilsone, which means non-citizen, into English as alien. and in French, foreigner. Yeah, it creates problems for you for freedom of movement. When you are abroad, authorities don't know how to understand the statics. They don't understand why, if Latvia claims that we have the same rights, why do they call us aliens?
18:19And what does it mean to be a national alien? I'm of the opinion that these terms should not be there. The government told us that aliens' passport is the official English term for the non-citizen passport, and visa-free travel is broadly available across the Schengen area. Novel citizens are encouraged to clarify entry regulations to foreign countries prior to their travel. The simplest way to ensure that young people do not face any difficulties at border crossings is to become citizens of Latvia, as Latvia has consistently encouraged. After a few years, I wanted to submit my application for naturalisation.
18:58Here's Albert again. In the office of citizenship and migration in Latvia, they told me, sorry, you're not allowed to apply because you are already living outside of Latvia, even for your studies. So you need to wait because the law clearly states that you must leave last five years before submitting your application in Latvia. I needed to wait like four more years after my studying because there is an exception. One year is possible of being outside. So I did it, actually. My application was processed for one year. They made a lot of requests and a lot of questions there was. And unfortunately, after this one year of processing, they rejected my application on the ground that I was not living again in Latvia permanently for five years before applying.
19:59And that was, again, quite disappointing for me. The good point is that the court of appeal in Latvia, they found my objections like correct and declared me as a Latvian citizen. So I was very happy at this stage. Unfortunately, it was overturned by the Supreme Court. So this was very hard for me to accept, actually. Still, I do not agree with it. And currently, I submitted my claim to the United Nations. Also, I plan to submit my claim to the Constitutional Court as well. And I think that Latvian non-citizens who lived all their life in Latvia know the culture, know the language and is fully integrated into Latvian society.
20:58There is no need for them to, you know, to prove this quite strange requirements, maybe at least to simplify it somehow. The Latvian government told us that the naturalization process has been steadily simplified with major exemptions for young people, those educated in Latvian, and people with disabilities. There were a few amendments, and last of it was in 2020, actually. They stopped creating newborn non-citizens. This is a very great achievement. My child was born, actually, in 2022, and fortunately he is now a Latvian citizen, yes, due to this amendment.
21:47But still, nationality remains a very sensitive issue for states. It still remains intimately linked to national identity, to history, to historical traumas, to who belongs here and who doesn't belong here, to culture, to language, sometimes to religion. So it's not very easy to deal with a human rights issue which is related to such a sensitive topic. My name is Mohamed Elias. I born in Myanmar, Rakhine State. There is a small town near the border of Bangladesh, Bangdore Township. Elias is Rohingya. They have their own language and culture and believe they've been in the region for centuries.
22:27But the Burmese military regime does not accept our existence. They blame us. We are illegal immigrants. We entered from Bangladesh. So they call us Bengali. But this term we never accept. June 2012. BBC News. For decades, the Rohingya Muslim minority of Rakhine State have been virtual non-people. ...been described as among the most persecuted on earth and are considered to be stateless. We are not same race, we are not same religion. That is the reason we are facing this discrimination. Bordegard police, they started restrictions. They refrained our rights for education and business, freedom of movement, everything.
23:17They restricted us. Even if we cannot travel one village to another village, I have to take a permission letter. If you think of statelessness as a technology to control and to exclude, then you can see statelessness being used by governments around the world to do that. Human rights lawyer Amal Dachikara is co-director of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. So, for example, you would have large groups in many countries that were colonized who are stateless. The justification for their statelessness is that the colonizers forcibly moved people to these countries from other colonies, and therefore they're seen as not really belonging to that country.
24:01Give me an example of that. In Sri Lanka, my own country, you had the Hill Country Tamil community, which was stateless until the early 2000s. They were brought to Sri Lanka from India. You may not have a passport, you may not have an identity document, you may not have a birth certificate, you may not be able to freely move around the country where you were born or where you live for a long time. You may be denied rights, like right to education, right to participate in the labour market or have a job. and many stateless populations around the world are pushed to the edges of society. They live in destitution.
24:38The International Court of Justice in The Hague has begun hearing accusations of genocide brought against Myanmar for its violent campaign against the Muslim Rohingya population. BBC News, December 2019. Aung San Suu Kyi claimed the Rohingya exodus in 2017 was sparked by attacks by Rohingya militants. She did admit the Myanmar army, which she doesn't control, had killed civilians in the security operation that followed. I fled in 2017. So I tried to get documents, but I don't have a passport. Rohingya has no passport. Your only chance is irregular migration if you want to escape, if you want to seek refuge.
25:18And this pushes stateless populations to the arms of smugglers, trafficking. I tried to save my life, so I chose the Netherlands. Elias now lives in Rotterdam. After arriving here, one immigration asked me, no, they didn't understand about the state letters. They asked me, only are you Rohingya? When I prove I am a Rohingya, so they agree as a genocide survivor, they approve you are facing discrimination, your life is threatened in your country, we approve you to live in the Netherlands. and after the five years you can apply for permanent citizenship rights. There is an important minority of stateless persons in the world who are in a migratory context.
26:03So they are migrants, asylum seekers, refugees themselves, a significant overlap. Yet the two groups should not be confused. There are many stateless persons who are not refugees, who are not migrants, who live in the country where they belong very strongly and where they have deep roots. Most commonly, we're not made stateless for what we do, we're made stateless for who we are, for holding a particular ethnicity or religion, or just because our mother is female, because 24 countries in the world don't allow women to pass a nationality. For example, a Lebanese or a Syrian or an Iranian mother has a child.
26:44That child will not inherit the mother's nationality. The problem comes when the father is stateless or when the father is not there. The father is no longer with the family. The father is dead or the father just doesn't recognize the child as his own. In that case, even though the mother is not stateless, the child will be born stateless. And there are many stateless children like this, especially in Middle Eastern countries. And these discriminatory frameworks don't just create statelessness, but they reinforce existing inequalities and can affect entire generations.
27:24America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. The Interview. The best conversations from across the BBC. Today we are spending trillions on war and peanuts on peace. With the people shaping our world. You're making decisions that will have long-term consequences for the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
28:11Wind power in the United States has been subsidised for 33 years. Solar for 25 years. That's enough! The interview from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
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28:27You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. We've been hearing what it's like to live with no nationality. For young people like Christiane Buckelo from Germany, statelessness often throws up unexpected challenges and obstacles. So at the age of 24, 25, I finished my master's degree and I finally had this job and I felt like now is the time that my life can start and I can finally live the way I want to live. And then I decided to kind of treat myself to a trip. and you get this travel document, but nobody really explains to you how are you able to use it, what are the limitations and so forth.
29:06Gabor Julai is a founding member of the European Network on Statelessness. It's a specific travel document, which is very similar to the specific travel document of refugees. These are travel documents that are regulated by international conventions and when states ratify those conventions, they accept the obligation of issuing such documents to the persons concerned. It states that you are allowed to travel to all countries, but it doesn't say anything about the different criteria. So I researched, I looked at the tourist website of Marrakesh, I reached out to the German immigration office and also the Moroccan embassy.
29:45The German local authority never responded and the Moroccan embassy just responded that they don't know what statelessness is. So I researched again and then on the tourist website, I saw that people from Germany, that's how I read it, are allowed to enter the country.
30:06I flew to Morocco, to Marrakesh, and when I landed, there was this regular passport control. The queue got longer and longer behind me, and the security guard was repeating the same questions all the time. Where were you born? Why do you don't have a citizenship? What are your documents? all of the same thing all of the time. And then he stood up and went away and started asking colleagues.
30:33Ten minutes went by, twenty minutes, at some point it was thirty minutes and people already started going to other queues. And then I noticed that he was standing there with four colleagues so at that time it was five security guards looking at my documents. And at some point they came back to me and asked me to follow them and told me that I would not be allowed to enter the country. They had already booked the next flight back to Germany. And unfortunately to them, Germany is just Germany, and it was not back to Munich, where I came from, but back to Düsseldorf, another German city, which is very far away from Munich.
31:05They then asked me to follow them through the entire airport, so I was surrounded by three on each side, who then led me through the airport and through the security check again, and then to the gate, and told me that I would have to wait here because the next flight to Germany didn't depart on that day, but actually on the next day. So I spent 20 hours at the Marrakesh airport at that gate waiting for the next flight to Düsseldorf. And that was a very traumatizing experience. In that moment, I realized, regardless of all the things that I've accomplished and regardless of how much I've contributed, in a sense, to German society, in the end, I'm still a stateless person.
31:52It was a very hurtful realization. I think it was also a very important realization because that then led me to researching more about statelessness again and then also deciding to start state-free. Border guards, airlines, public transport, others, they just often have no idea what this means to be stateless. Sometimes some languages even lack an expression for statelessness or sometimes the expression that they use can be very easily conflated or confused with something else. For example, in the Hungarian language, when you say stateless, it's a word which is often mistakenly used for homeless.
32:28And this creates a lot of misunderstandings when you want to raise this topic, for example, with authorities or with social service providers. For Albert Joffe, a Latvian aliens passport comes with its own set of challenges. So actually, I need visas all over the world, in all the countries, except only the European Union. Another also important impact is a lot of European Union companies. They do not want to consider me as a candidate because they do not want to deal with any special work permits because I need it in order for them to hire me. This is, I would say, the main impact on my life.
33:15Alexei, who's hosting the event in Budapest is also a Latvian non-citizen Yes, unfortunately I have to not only turn down speaking opportunities but also sometimes speaking opportunities turn me down because they're not willing to go through the difficulty of supporting my visa or waiting for me to provide a confirmation for instance I was invited to speak at the Global Citizenship Conference in London in November of 2025. And I even went to Latvia because I thought it would be easier to get a visa there because my passport is from there. Travel agents told me that, no, they don't do that anymore.
33:57They advised that maybe I'll have more luck in Warsaw. I went to Warsaw. I found out that the visa processing center just recently closed down. So I was quite disappointed. Actually, I've heard that I was nominated for the Global Citizen Award. I wanted to win it, even for the irony, because I'm not a citizen of anywhere, so maybe having a global citizenship would have made me feel special in having some sort of citizenship. I just try to be as trustworthy and charming and educated in all of those things as possible so that people won't even have another choice than hiring me. but that obviously is also a very, very, very exhausting lifestyle.
34:45Oftentimes the person who hired me was so convinced about me and my skills and so forth that they would always, always have my back when it got to HR having questions about my status. I was a bit naive to the situation because I was like, I'm born here, I've lived here my entire life. Any influence that I've ever had in life has been British. Sam Tri's mother, who's from Sierra Leone, settled in the UK legally. His mother could have registered him as a citizen when he was a child, but failed to do so. She had a permanent residency status known as indefinite leave to remain, which she was able to pass on to Sam.
35:27She didn't really consult with people and didn't seek advice. So because she didn't really understand things, she got an indefinite leave to remain and placed me as a dependent. And tell me how you lost your indefinite leave to remain. So basically, I used to have like a substance misuse issue when I was young. During those times, I was going through a lot. I didn't have a lot of stability. My mum was going to work. I don't really see my mum till eight o 'clock at night. And I fell into that wrong influence. I held a mobile phone for a guy in my area. and obviously that mobile phone was tied to drugs.
36:08There was like 14 people arrested. I didn't have any drugs but I had the mobile phone that was involved in the drugs and was given a 28-month sentence and that is why, because I received more than 12 months, well, they tried to deport me. And how old were you at that point? I was 20, 21. And did you know the risk you were running with your indefinite leave to remain by getting involved in this activity? I didn't even know what indefinite leave to remain was. While he was in prison, Sam was informed by letter that he would, on his release, be deported to Sierra Leone, a country he'd never lived in.
36:47My belly dropped because I was so shocked, I couldn't understand, couldn't really register how I would be in a position to be deported. I don't even have a passport to be deported. This is going to sound like an aggressive question. I don't mean it to be aggressive, but I'm interested in the answer. Was there any part of you that thought, well, I brought this all on myself? Of course. I can take accountability for my actions, for all my actions. When I was released from prison on that occasion, I was 22. I wasn't allowed to work, claim benefits, study, drive, and that was for 10 years straight from 2013 up until 2023.
37:32I was billed£1 ,200 because I had a colonoscopy. I suffered from colitis, so I was billed£1 ,200 by the NHS. Which the rest of us would get for free? Yes. And can you afford that? Of course not. I had to lean on friends and family. There's only so much you can lean on. So you got involved again with criminal activity? to. I got back holding the phone again because I couldn't survive. Do you know what I mean? And coming from my family, I'm from a single parent and I'm an only child. So do you know what I mean? There's not really a lot of people to help. So, and I'm not making that as an excuse.
38:10I'm just telling the truth. First and foremost, I would say it's embarrassing because people are getting married. People are buying houses. People are getting good jobs. They're working their way up the ladder in whatever industry that they're in. and you're stagnating and then you lose relationships because you're frustrated that you can't do certain things you can't travel you can't seek opportunities and your energy's off and people don't really want to be around energies that's off or people don't even want to talk about the good things because they might think that saying this in front of you might trigger you So it has a horrible toll on people's mental health to live their life at extreme level of difficulty.
38:57Yeah, and it's a constant experience of rejection. And that then is combined with this feeling of shame. So it is also emotionally extremely draining and a huge challenge. When I started Stay Free, my number one goal was not to be affiliated with it. So on the first website we had, I used the pen name actually, because it wasn't supposed to be about me in my case, but it was supposed to be about statelessness and what we need to do. And also, I hadn't really come out as a stateless person to people in my surrounding. A lot of close friends didn't even know. and at my job nobody knew like apart from my boss who supported me with hr and i think all of us like our number one goal as human beings is to belong so why would we risk belonging by othering ourselves and now i'm being asked to talk about my statelessness and it's been tough my vision is for state people to regain pride in their identity so i should be the one leading by example but i I also at the same time want to be authentic and honest about it and want to be able to share the vulnerability of me currently not being confident about my statelessness.
40:22Back in Budapest, the conference on statelessness is almost over. We decided to have a bowling social. We have football here as well and people just spending time chatting. It's important for us to connect, to utilize freedom of assembly. to share our knowledge. I hear this from my colleagues as well. When we started to do this, we got almost excited, saying, oh, wow, I also have this problem. Oh, wow, they also give you this kind of document. Oh, wow, you also have this kind of history. I'm just happy that I connected. I know that I'm not alone, and it makes me feel better. And I think that's something that is very powerful in itself to just try to make sense of what is the situation.
41:19Here's what happened to Sam. The detention centre was HMP de Verne. He was held for a total of eight months across two separate occasions, even though deportation proved impossible because Sierra Leone did not recognise him as a citizen. I've got the letter from the Sierra Leone High Commission. It says,
42:04He is over 18 and would have to apply for citizenship, which I then subsequently did and didn't receive. On the 26th of July 2017, you requested permission to work. That's a letter from the Home Office. I have refused your request for permission to work at this stage because you do not have an asylum claim or an asylum-related submission outstanding for more than 12 months. Therefore, you may not take employment in the United Kingdom, nor may you be self-employed or engage in business or professional activity. But that allowed me to go for a judicial review of that refusal. I then won the case, they dropped the deportation order, but it rendered me stateless.
42:49And have you now got your indefinite leave to remain restored? No. They've given me discretionary leave to remain. Every two and a half years, I've been told I have to pay£3 ,800. To renew your discretionary leave to remain? Yes, sir. So if it's discretionary, somebody could take it away from you? I'm assuming so. Are you working now? I'm doing risk assessment. I'm actually shadowing a man to then learn about Legionella, fire risk and health and safety risk assessments. Are you earning a salary? Well, I will eventually be earning a salary after this. Well, how are you living now then without a salary?
43:24I live at my mum's. She's an after-stroke patient, but I just tend to her at the moment. So you're a carer for your mother? Yes. How do you keep your spirits up? How do you keep your morale up? How do I keep my morale up? I just block it out. This is a very diverse phenomenon. We have to understand this diversity in order to tackle the challenge. Gabor Julay. What is common in all these contexts, however, is that the only real solution to statelessness in all of these cases is having a nationality. You may have immediate solutions which are different. You may offer a protection status. You may offer some sort of a residence permit or a specific status of a non-citizen or others, but this is always temporary.
44:07The only real solution to statelessness will be having a nationality. Even if you have a relatively good legal status as a stateless person in a country, at least psychologically, it will never be the same. You will never feel so safe, so secure, so much officially belonging to the place which is your home than when you are having a nationality. Nowadays, there are very progressive regional declarations by states in different regions like West Africa or Latin America or Central Asia. Modest but still existing signs of progress and more awareness in Europe. So a lot has changed. Human rights lawyer Amal de Chikora.
44:49What's important to recognize is that the question isn't about the state finding ways to naturalize them or to kind of, you know, recognize their stateless status. It's about the state being held to account to fulfill their right to nationality and to right a wrong that has been done to them. In that context, we have seen actually worrying trends in the other direction. For example, India has, over the last few years, gone through this programme of denationalising over 2 million people. BBC News, January 2018. The state of Assam in north-east India has published a draft register of citizens as part of plans to deport illegal immigrants back to neighbouring Bangladesh.
45:36A national register of citizens in Assam required residents to prove that they or their families lived in India before March 24, 1971. Politicians in India's Assam state have long accused Bangladeshi Muslims of illegally crossing over into the state and taking the jobs of Hindus. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist BJP, which won state elections in 2016, has promised to act against what it calls illegal Muslim residents. Those excluded from the list have a right to appeal, but if they lose their case, they may be declared foreigners and are at risk of becoming stateless, since Bangladesh doesn't acknowledge them as citizens either.
46:18A report co-authored by Queen Mary University and the National Law School of India University stated that since January 2025, almost 166 ,000 people have been declared foreigners, with over 85 ,000 cases still pending.
46:38Six months after Budapest, Alexei, Albert and a group of other stateless advocates are meeting again in Brussels, this time to address politicians. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a status-led organisation hosted a session on statelessness in the European Parliament. And it was a success, particularly in terms of childhood statelessness prevention, but also obviously to see how to make life more livable for many native Europeans rooted in Europe and have ancestral links here, but unfortunately cannot access any European citizenship. In the 1990s, the EU insisted that Latvia and Estonia should scrap citizenship laws that discriminated against their Russian-speaking minorities.
47:29A non-discriminatory citizenship law was presented to them as a prerequisite for membership of the EU. Both countries joined in 2004, but continue to categorize some citizens as aliens. Stateless campaign groups argue that this violates the principles of equality and non-discrimination and the right to political participation, as set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. But earlier this year, the EU stated that the granting of nationality was a prerogative of each member state and not of the European Union. The European Commission cannot intervene in the legitimate exercise of powers by member states in this area, but can act only if a member state's rules on the acquisition and loss of nationality breach EU law.
48:18Citizenship policies is for member states to decide. The only solution would be if one day we would agree that we have European citizenship, and there was ambition and we tried to do something with this Conference of Future of Europe. There were big discussions about that, to reform European Union, but there is no political consensus for that.
48:43This is MEP Yana Toom, who sponsored the event in Brussels. I was the first Russian-speaking politician who was elected from Estonia to Europe in Parliament. It was 2014. Like Latvia, Estonia established a special status of undefined citizenship, which was given to residents from former Soviet republics and their children. There was proposal that, OK, let's say the people, that now you have a year, you can apply for Estonian citizenship, no exams. You just, you know, prove that you are loyal to Estonia and you get citizenship and then this chapter is closed. And those who don't want, they just don't use this opportunity and then everything is clear.
49:26But this proposal never flied. There was only a central party and some social democrats who supported the idea, but no. And I understand why, because Estonia is a very small country. Even the 60 ,000, 70 ,000 people who would be given the right to vote in parliamentary elections will absolutely change the whole political landscape. Igor Taro is the Estonian Minister of the Interior. Minister, can I ask you first of all, tell me roughly how many stateless people are currently living in Estonia? I think none. You don't have any stateless people at all? I don't know who I'm considering stateless people.
50:14Well... The definition of stateless people. I mean, we have some people of undetermined citizenship, but they are living in Estonia, enjoying all the benefits of Estonian states, very safe environment and everything else. And I couldn't consider them stateless in this regard. And why is the citizenship undetermined then? As I understand, that's their wish. This is a question of free will. If a person wants to determine this citizenship, then he or she can do it. And we actually, Estonia, have been working very hard to help everyone who wants to get Estonian citizenship. Because more than 20 years ago, we have had about 170 ,000 people with undetermined citizenship.
51:23But now we have under 60 ,000 people. And why is that? It's just because at one period it became a choice of convenience. Because when Estonia joined the European Union, the people who had undetermined citizenship, and they also had a travel document from Estonia, they could enjoy all the benefits of traveling freely around the european union but actually russian federation made the move of giving possibility to freely travel to russia for these people also. So it was very convenient for some of them to keep this kind of status. And for some, it was possible, for example, to avoid compulsory conscription to the army in Estonia, yes.
52:39Let me put something to you that stateless campaign groups argue. They say that Estonia's alien status violates the principles of equality and non-discrimination, and the right to political participation are set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. What do you say to that? I say that we have not invented any special stateless status, as they are saying. If you want to have political rights in the terms of participating, for example, in the general elections, then you need to have a citizenship. And it is the right of every person to choose what citizenship he or she wants to.
53:24And there is no unreasonable, any unreasonable obstacles of getting the citizenship. And the statistics actually shows this. and Estonia, we have been constantly simplifying the process. In Brussels, one speaker arrives 40 minutes late to the statelessness event because the parliament's security guards had to double-check her documents. People especially don't know what is this because unfortunately it looks horrible. It doesn't look even like a book. It looks like a piece of paper, like folded five times. My name is Lizaveta Żuckova. I'm working in the Office of Belarus Democratic Forces in Czech Republic.
54:09As I'm having a student visa, I'm getting the travel certificate of identity. Belarus recently ruled that Belarusians living abroad can only renew their passports or acquire documents for their children born abroad if they return to Belarus. But many political exiles are afraid that they'll be arrested at the border. I am criminally charged in Belarus for betraying the motherland and participating in an extremist organization. My Instagram is recognized as extremist by the Belarusian authorities. I am Belarusian, but after my passport expired, I am still Belarusian, but I have no documents which can approve me.
54:53Alexei from the Apertried Network. You know, exiles that don't have their documents issued by their state authorities, and you have no way to prove your nationality, well, then you don't enjoy an effective nationality. That the person concerned has got a nationality, but is unable to exercise those rights which are connected to it because of discriminatory actions by the state. This is what we call de facto statelessness. There are certain scholars also in the academia who say that de facto statelessness doesn't exist. You know, technically, you know, there's a lot of technical debate, but it doesn't matter.
55:40You know, if you're experiencing something like this, your experience matters. I love my country. I love the people. And even for my future, I think I shouldn't get any other citizenship or give away mine. So why solutions exist to resolve statelessness? Their implementation depends heavily on the willingness and capacity of individual states because at the end of the day, resolving statelessness is only about political will. It's not the actors that cause this that will resolve this. We really need to step up as stateless people and need to be involved as equal partners in these dialogues, but also as equal contributors to the whole discourse to make sure that it's not tilted in some Kafkaesque way where things just don't make sense at all and we have completely arbitrary use of power because that's not how state actors are supposed to function.
56:41There's supposed to be what's called good governance and you cannot have good governance if you're just using your power arbitrarily. None of us has the power as an individual to decide who gets a citizenship and who loses citizenship. And I think it's very important for all of us to hold states accountable because states should be here to protect us. So recently we've met new people who are based in South Africa, in Lebanon, in Sweden, Denmark, in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain. We also recently had a person from Nepal who wanted to join, but they weren't able to travel, unfortunately. But we still involved them in our work.
57:24You've been listening to the documentary Young and Stateless from the BBC World Service, presented by me, Alan Little, and produced by Victoria Ferran. It's a Just Radio production for the BBC World Service.
From the publisher
What does it mean to belong nowhere? Across the world, millions of people are denied citizenship and live without a country to call their own. It is estimated half of these are children. The majority of people become stateless or are born stateless through no fault of their own, but the onus is often put on the individual to fight for access to basic human rights that citizens take for granted. With insight from long-time experts, we discover how borders, nationality laws, histories and gender discrimination continue to exclude millions. We hear what it means to grow up without a passport, to be denied access to education, jobs and healthcare, to navigate Kafka-esque bureaucracy. Yet this is also a story of resilience, of young people who are holding state actors to account and shaping a global movement for recognition and pride.
