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statelessness

Status of a person who is not a citizen/national of any country

Also known as stateless

Instance of: role
, citizenship
Subclass of: nationality

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

In international law, a stateless person is someone who is "not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law". Some stateless people are also refugees. However, not all refugees are stateless, and many people who are stateless have never crossed an international border. At the end of 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees published an estimation of 4.4 million people worldwide as either stateless or of undetermined nationality, which is 90,800 more than at the end of 2021. However, the data itself is not complete because UNHCR does not have data from many countries, such as from at least 22 countries where mass statelessness exists. The data also does not include de facto stateless people who have no legal identification to prove their nationality or legal existence. According to the World Bank, at least 850 million fit that category.

Overview

All data

27 statements · 33% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Different from: statelessness
stateless nation
Next lower rank: homeless person
Opposite of: citizen

On other databases

20 identifiers linking statelessness across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

33%

externally sourced

Source last edited October 12, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). statelessness (Q223050). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/statelessness-Q223050