On 3 November at the Frontline Club, photojournalist Greg Constantine spoke to UNHCR’s UK representative Gonzalo Vargas Llosa about Nowhere People, Constantine’s body of ten years of photographic work on the world’s estimated 10m stateless people.

A stateless person “under law is considered no citizen of any country,” said Constantine. “Once citizenship is severed, it opens people up to an array of deprivation of rights.”

The number of global stateless may exceed 10m, according to Vargas Llosa, as “very few governments want to give exact statistics on stateless people inside their borders.”

Constantine’s talk at the Frontline Club comes on the first anniversary of the launch of I Belong, a UN campaign to “end the scourge of statelessness by 2024,” said Vargas Llosa.

Constantine showed images from his meetings with stateless peoples, including the Rohingya in Bangladesh and Malaysia; Nubians in Kenya; Filipinos in Saba, Malaysia; the Dali in Nepal; the Dom in Iraq; ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic; and Roma in Italy.

“Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them” after end of Yugoslavia says @grconstantine @frontlineclub

— Charlotte Beale (@CharlotteAGB) November 3, 2015

Constantine also shared quotes from stateless men and women he had met, including from Jafar, a stateless Rohingya in Bangladesh: “Because we don’t have citizenship, we are like a fish out of water, flapping and unable to breathe. When a fish is out of water, he suffocates.”

“The legacy of colonialism is very much a part of people becoming stateless in Asia and Africa,” said Constantine. “The creation of the idea of ‘others’ that came from French colonialism is responsible for the Ivory Coast’s stateless people… Denial of citizenship is directly attached to Ivorian conflict and the 2002 civil war was borne from a clash of identity – us and them.”

He added: “Most times, you find stateless people are not refugees. Most have never left the country in which they were born.”

“The Rohingya is by far the most extreme example of statelessness in the world today,” Constantine continued, despite them playing a huge role in the economy of southern Bangladesh.

“40,000 Rohingya are living segregated lives in Internationally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps [in Burma],” said Constantine. They are put up in “tents… that psychologically make them think their situation as IDPs is temporary… The conflict has been manufactured by Burmese central government, by 40 years of oppressive policies that pitted communities against each other.”

“The administrative tactics states use to humiliate their stateless fly under the radar of the world’s media,” said Constantine. Discrimination against ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic has been “manifested into policy.”

Vargas Llosa added that in the Dominican Republic, “statelessness is the result of deliberate, well-planned, well-executed policies” by the government.

While “huge strides” have been made in Iraq, which has “some of the most progressive laws in the Middle East,” Domari gypsies still suffer. Similarly, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, “Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them.” Because of certain laws, generations of Roma in Italy “are not afforded opportunities to become citizens,” Constantine said.

“Gender discriminating nationality laws are all over the Middle East and Africa,” added Constantine. He highlighted this with a comment on the situation in Lebanon – a young subject born to a Lebanese mother and a stateless father must inherit her father’s stateless condition. 27 countries globally limit a mother’s ability to pass her nationality onto her family.

A member of the audience pointed out that “the state is often an enemy of the people it is supposed to be administering,” and asked Constantine and Vargas Llosa their opinion of the role of the state in creating statelessness crises.

“What strikes one from Greg’s images is the evil a state can do,” Vargas Llosa agreed. “What happens when the caregiver of human rights ends up being the vehicle which perpetrates the denial of those rights?”

Constantine deplored the “sovereign right of a state to determine who its citizens are and who they aren’t.”

Visit the Nowhere People website to find out more.

By Nicole Hunt

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors meets in Vienna on Monday, with Iran likely to be high on the agenda following last week’s report expressing increased concerns over ‘undisclosed nuclear related activities’ in the country.

Bouthaina Shaaban, political adviser to Syrian President Bashar al Assad, is in Moscow, where she is scheduled to meet with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and hold a press conference for international media. Shaaban was one of three Syrian officials slapped with sanctions by the US Treasury Department at the end of August.

The African National Congress is expected to wrap up disciplinary proceedings against controversial ANC youth leader Julius Malema on Tuesday, having recently moved the hearing from the ANC headquarters at Luthuli House to an undisclosed location in Johannesburg following violent protests last week. Malema is accused of bringing the ANC into disrepute and sowing divisions within ANC ranks after he encouraged the overthrow of Botswana’s government.

In Brussels, the OECD publishes its annual Education at a Glance report, analysing the education systems and performances in member states. For the first time, this year’s report also looks at education in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg hears a complaint on Wednesday brought by four people who say they were illegally deprived of their liberty without justification while they were held in a police ‘kettle’ during the 2001 May Day protests in London.

In New York, the UN Security Council holds a debate on drought-stricken Somalia, where security issues have compounded problems as aid struggles to get into the country and people struggle to get out.

Parliamentary elections take place in Denmark on Thursday. Recent polls say Helle Thorning-Schmidt could be the country’s next Prime Minister, as her opposition Social Democrat party looks poised to win the most seats.

A court in The Hague is due to rule on Apple’s application to ban sales of Samsung’s Galaxy phones. A temporary injunction banning sales and distribution throughout much of Europe was issued on 11 August, but is not due to come into effect until 13 October.

Following debates this week in several European parliaments on new powers for the European Financial Stability Fund, European finance ministers begin a two-day meeting on Friday.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague holds a confirmation of charges hearing for Callixte Mbarushimana, a former UN employee charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2009. Mbarushimana is alleged to have been the executive secretary of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and directly responsible for at least 32 deaths in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide while still employed by the UN, but has never been charged.

Libyan schools are scheduled to re-open on Saturday, with a brand new curriculum devoid of Gaddafi-era subjects such as the Green Book.

At the Dead Sea in Israel, photographer Spencer Turnick stages another mass nude photoshoot, hoping to bring awareness to the fact that the famously salty lake is drying up.

The week wraps up with state elections in Berlin, the sixth in Germany this year. The regional elections have generally proven disastrous for Angela Merkel’s CDU party, which has suffered losses country-wide to the Social Democrats, a trend that many expect to continue into the 2013 federal election.