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A stateless child is born every 10 minutes, which equals at least 70,000 per year. Currently this occurs largely because of discriminatory citizenship laws and violent conflict that has displaced millions of families across the globe, the U.N. refugee agency, or UNHCR, reported Wednesday.
“Stateless children across the world share similar feelings of discrimination, frustration and despair, creating problems that can endure into adulthood,” says the UNHCR report, which calls for urgent action before problems faced by stateless children and youth become “set in stone.”
The agency conducted a series of interviews with immigrants who had grown up stateless and it concluded that as children these people were highly vulnerable to exploitation, drugs and hopelessness and permanent disenfranchisement.
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The U.N. warns that a total of 30 countries currently receive stateless people who require documentation before they can receive basic medical treatment, while 20 nations do not allow stateless children to be vaccinated.
There are currently 10 million people facing a situation of statelessness and 3 million of them are children. In the interviews conducted by the U.N., the “stateless” people described themselves as “invisible,” “alien,” “living in a shadow,” “like a street dog” and “worthless.”
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Stateless children like Joe in the Dominican Republic live in a state of limbo https://t.co/nQY9ShgZsm #IBelong pic.twitter.com/wqjog2Iejv
— UN Refugee Agency (@Refugees)
November 4, 2015
This new report comes as European Union countries are struggling to deal with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing violence in African and Middle Eastern countries, in what has been called the worst refugee crisis since World War II.
1/3 of the world's 10 million stateless people are children. Read our new report: https://t.co/jzV5gYf0mF #IBelong pic.twitter.com/mebySbKojZ
— UNHCR United Kingdom (@UNHCRUK)
November 3, 2015
The lack of nationality often sentences stateless children and their families and communities to remain impoverished and marginalized for generations. That's why the U.N. has proposed the abolition of discriminatory laws that in some cases even prevent mothers from passing on their nationalities to their children.
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