Nowhere to call home

摘要

Some lucky babies are entitled to a clutch of passports: one born in America to a Lebanese father and Japanese mother, for example, can have three. Other unfortunates-one born in Norway to a Lebanese mother and unknown father, say-are entitled to none at all. Unless some country takes pity on them, they will join the world's 10m or so stateless people in legal limbo, acknowledged as citizens nowhere. Many are unable to work legally, travel across borders or use public services. Almost none can vote or stand for election. Some of the biggest groups of stateless people are in countries with poor statistics; those who can be counted number 3.5m (see chart). Many lack a nationality because their homelands splintered and they fell in the cracks between successor states' citizenship rules. Estonia and Latvia, for example, require descendants of Russians who arrived during the Soviet period to pass a language test before becoming citizens, thus excluding monoglot Russians. Russia, too, has many stateless people, many of them forced migrants, or their descendants, who ended up in the wrong place when the Soviet Union collapsed.