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Wednesday 16, May 2012
BUDAPEST, May 16 (UNHCR) – Mstislav Rostropovich, late Russian cello player, was deprived of his citizenship between 1978 and 1990, yet he could see his international fame grow and received standing ovation at every concert he gave. Unlike him, most stateless people in the world are anonymous and forgotten.
According to the estimates of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are some 12 million people worldwide who are living without nationality.
They are among the most vulnerable groups in the world: they are not citizens of any country, are unable to prove their identity and to enjoy a wide range of basic rights, such as registering the birth of their child, getting married or employed legally, traveling freely or owning property.
“Nowhere People”, a black-and-white photo exhibition of Greg Constantine displayed in the Palace of Arts in Budapest aims to give a human face to this global issue and bring to light the plight of stateless people worldwide.
His award-winning photos depict families for whom statelessness means living in slums on less than 1 dollar a day and children who cannot go to school and have to start work at the age of four or five to earn a living.
American photographer Greg Constantine has photographed stateless communities from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Malaysia and Sri Lanka over the past seven years and has worked together with UNHCR since 2008 on documenting the human drama of becoming stateless in Ukraine, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire.
People become stateless for a variety of reasons, such as conflicting nationality laws, discriminative marriage laws, lack of birth registration or exclusion of specific ethnic, linguistic or religious groups from citizenship when a state becomes independent.
In Central and Eastern Europe, several thousands have been left stateless after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the 1990s. Although, most cases have been resolved, many still remain stranded from neighbouring countries and further afield, living without citizenship, a legal bond to a state.
According to the latest available figures, in Slovakia and Poland there are an estimated 1,000 people without nationality.
Hungary is among a handful of countries in the world, which have not only signed the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, but also established a legal procedure to confer formal stateless status on people who are not recognized as citizens of any country. However, gaps remain, stateless people still face difficulties in their daily life in accessing basic rights and services and their stateless status is often little understood even by local authorities in Hungary.
Greg Constantine’s globe-trotting exhibition, “Nowhere people” has already been on display in New York, Kiev, London, Nairobi, Hong Kong, Belgrade and several other cities of the world.
The Budapest exhibition, organized by the Hungarian Ministry of Interior and UNHCR, will be open from 16 to 31 May 2012 in the lobby and corridor area of the Palace of Arts, near the Festival Theatre, with free entry.
Éva Hegedűs and Ernő Simon in Budapest, Hungary
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