Children Without a State

Children are among the most vulnerable citizens of the world, with a special need forthe protections, rights, and services offered by states. And yet children are particularly at riskfrom statelessness. Thirty-six percent of all births in the world are not registered, leaving morethan forty-eight million children under the age of five with no legal identity and no formal claimon any state. Millions of other children are born stateless or become undocumented as a result ofmigration. Children Without a State is the first book to examine how statelessness affects childrenthroughout the world, examining this largely unexplored problem from a human rights perspective. Thebook identifies three contemporary manifestations of statelessness: legal statelessness, when peoplelack any nationality because of the circumstances of their birth or political and legal obstacles;de facto statelessness, when nationals of one country live illegally in another; and effectivestatelessness, when legal citizens lack the documentation to prove their right to state services.]The human rights repercussions range from dramatic abuses (detention and deportation) to socialmarginalization (lack of access to education and health care). The book provides a variety ofexamples, including chapters on Palestinian children in Israel, undocumented young people seekinghigher education in the United States, unaccompanied child migrants in Spain, Roma children inItaly, irregular internal child migrants in China, and children in mixed legal/illegal families inthe United States.

Jacqueline Bhabha is Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Lecturer at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard University Adviser to the Provost on Human Rights Education. She is the coauthor of Seeking Asylum Alone: Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection.