Young and stateless

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does it mean to belong nowhere? Across the world, millions of people are denied citizenship and live without a country to call their own. It is estimated half of these are children. The majority of people become stateless or are born stateless through no fault of their own, but the onus is often put on the individual to fight for access to basic human rights that citizens take for granted. With insight from long-time experts, we discover how borders, nationality laws, histories and gender discrimination continue to exclude millions. We hear what it means to grow up without a passport, to be denied access to education, jobs and healthcare, to navigate Kafka-esque bureaucracy. Yet this is also a story of resilience, of young people who are holding state actors to account and shaping a global movement for recognition and pride.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:07.8	Statelessness might have been the longest forgotten human rights issue in modern human history.
0:16.0	When you're stateless, you're just in complete limbo in a grey zone.
0:24.6	It sometimes means that you lack even a legal existence. You are reduced to something like a legal ghost.
0:27.6	There's only one institution in this world that can create statelessness and end statelessness, and that is the state.
0:35.6	I wanted to work. I wanted to feed my family. I wanted to get out of this situation.
0:41.9	You know, over the years it becomes frustrating and quite painful.
0:47.9	Nationality is something a bit like air. When it's there, when we have it, we don't even realize its existence. It's natural. When it's missing, it has dramatic consequences.
0:59.9	If there are so many of us, why is statelessness then such an isolating experience?
1:09.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
1:12.4	I'm Alan Little, and this is Young and Stateless.
1:16.0	Over the next hour, we're going to hear how not having a nationality,
1:19.5	being a citizen of nowhere, gravely impacts your life,
1:23.5	and what young stateless people are doing to change things.
1:27.1	Because whenever we go somewhere and we ask questions,
1:30.4	how many of people here are familiar with the topic,
1:33.3	there's very few hands that one.
1:35.8	My name is Alexis Zivashuk.
1:38.1	I'm the founder of Appetreat Network.
1:40.3	It's a coalition of stateless individuals,
1:43.7	stateless other organizations and stateless communities in the European Union.
1:48.4	An Apertreed is a stateless person, someone who is not considered a national by any state under the operation of its law.
	...

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