25 August 2011 Last updated at 00:51

In pictures: The world's stateless people

A teenage girl fixes her hair at an illegal Roma camp near Nantes, western France (file image from 30 July 2010)

There are a total of 12 million stateless people worldwide, like this Roma girl living at an illegal camp in France, near the western city of Nantes.

Young Burmese refugees from the Rohingya ethnic minority attend their English class in Kuala Lumpur (file image from 16 August 2011)

Stateless people can face issues accessing education and opportunities. Here, two young Rohingya refugees attend an English class in Kuala Lumpur. An estimated 800,000 Rohingya live in Burma, while 300,000 live in Bangladesh.

Rohingya girls carry wood from the forest near a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh (file image from 19 August 2011).

In 1982 Burma passed a law which made it impossible for Rohingyas to get full citizenship.

A young boy at the Mosque during Friday prayers in Makina Mosque in Nairobi's Kibera slums (file image from 5 August 2011)

The Nubians have lived in Kenya for over 100 years but they are regularly denied national identity cards and passports which they need to work, vote, travel, own a mobile phone and attend university. Here a young boy attends Friday prayers at a mosque in Nairobi's Kibera slum.

Stateless Nina Tamang, 18, is seen as she sits near the window of her mud-stone hilltop home at the outskirts of Nepal's capital (file image from 14 August 2011).

Nina Tamang, 18, cannot become a citizen of Nepal because her father, who abandoned her mother after Nina was born, is absent and she has no official proof of his nationality.

World

In pictures: The world's stateless people

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