Once stateless, these young Crimean Tatars have now returned to Oktyabrskoe in southern Ukraine, where they are attending a national school

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers on Wednesday reminded states that there are several million stateless people in the world today and introduced Ukraine and Sri Lanka as positive examples of countries that had found resolutions for large groups of stateless people. Lubbers was speaking during a special panel discussion taking place at the annual meeting in Geneva of the UNHCR's governing Executive Committee. The panel was part of a year–long effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a UN convention dedicated to improving the lot of stateless people, and drawing more attention to the huge, but little–known problem of statelessness. "We have it everywhere," said Lubbers, citing a recent UNHCR survey of statelessness which revealed that it is a problem all over the world. However, there is far less information available about how many people are affected and the precise nature of their predicament, than is the case with refugees. Many countries simply have no idea how many stateless people there are on their territory. In other cases, there is little information available because the groups concerned are a highly sensitive issue in the domestic landscape. A stateless person is someone who is not considered a national by any state – including the one where he or she is living – and thus is not protected by any national legal system. Stateless people cannot vote. Even worse, they may be unable to marry legally, or register the birth of their children, thus perpetuating the cycle of statelessness. They are often deprived of the right to do things that other people living in the same country take completely for granted: go to school, get a job, open a bank account or travel abroad.