Some four and a half million people are counted as belonging to no country at all, and the true number is far larger. This page sets out what that means in law, what can be done about it, and what this Embassy does for the people in it.
Statelessness is what happens when the law of every state on earth declines to count you. Almost nobody arrives in it deliberately, and international law is built to keep people out of it.
Two conventions give stateless people identity papers, travel documents and a route to nationality. What is missing in most countries is a procedure for establishing that you are stateless in the first place.
Not a nationality — no church can give one. A record that you exist, an identification the Chancery will vouch for, someone beside you at the counter, and an introduction to people who do this in law.
There is one definition that matters in law, and it is shorter than most people expect.
A stateless person is someone “not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law” — Article 1(1) of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. Read it closely, because every word of it is doing work. It describes a fact, not a declaration: you are not stateless because you say so, or because you feel unclaimed, or because you have torn something up. You are stateless when the law of each state, applied to you, produces the same answer — not ours.
The Convention’s case: no state counts you as its national. This is the status that the two conventions address, and the one a determination procedure exists to establish.
A nationality exists on paper, but the state will not act on it — no consulate, no passport, no protection. The 1954 Convention does not reach this situation. The protection is weaker here, not stronger.
Statelessness is not the absence of a document. It is the absence of a state that will answer for you.
Inter sacrum et civileFive routes account for nearly all of it, and only one of them involves anybody’s decision — usually a government’s, not the person’s.
In none of these does the person do anything to themselves.
Statelessness is something that happens to people — through a gap, a prejudice, a border, an administrative silence. That matters for how it is spoken about, and it matters enormously for the warning further down this page.
More than most people know, and less than it sounds, because a right you have no procedure to claim is a right in the abstract.
Sources · UNHCR, Stateless people · United Nations treaty status, 1954 and 1961 Conventions. Figures are as reported at the dates given and are not updated automatically; check the sources before relying on them.
A statelessness determination procedure is a route by which a state examines your situation and, if it finds you stateless, says so formally. Where one exists it is the single most useful thing available to you. In much of Europe there is none.
Some states run a dedicated procedure with a defined application, a decision and a status attached. Others have no such thing, and statelessness surfaces only sideways — inside an asylum claim, a residence application, or a request for a travel document — where it is decided by an official answering a different question. The difference between those two situations is, for the person living it, the difference between a road and no road.
Germany has no dedicated statelessness determination procedure.
Statelessness can be identified only in the course of something else — an application for a 1954 Convention travel document, a residence permit application or extension, an asylum procedure, or proceedings around Duldung. A finding of statelessness carries no right of residence by itself; what follows may be toleration, a temporary permit where departure is impossible, or a discretionary humanitarian permit. Most people in this position are recorded as being of unclear nationality rather than recognised as stateless at all.
Austria’s position is comparable. This is not an argument against acting — it is an argument for acting with someone who knows which of those doors is yours.
Germany assessment · European Network on Statelessness, Statelessness Index country survey, 2024. Which states operate a procedure changes, and a list printed here would go stale. The Statelessness Index maintains the current position country by country, and it is the source to check rather than this page.
Some people want it. This page has argued one way throughout, and a reader who senses advocacy is right to discount everything else on it — so here is the case for choosing statelessness, put at its strongest, with an honest mark against each claim.
Two states in the world tax their nationals on worldwide income wherever they live: the United States and Eritrea. For an American abroad, giving up the nationality genuinely ends that liability and the reporting regime attached to it. This is the largest sum of money on the list and the claim is sound.
Where military or civil service attaches to nationality, losing the nationality ends the obligation going forward. In several states, though, the liability is precisely what blocks renunciation while it subsists — you are not permitted to leave until you have served or been excused.
Where a government treats its nationals abroad as leverage — pressing families at home, demanding returns, asserting jurisdiction over people who left decades ago — cutting the tie is not a fantasy. Some political exiles have done exactly this, and for them the reasoning is serious.
Nationality is assigned at birth without anyone’s agreement, and declining to be the property of a state you did not pick is a coherent moral position with a long literature behind it. It is not a foolish thing to believe.
In a state with a working determination procedure, being recognised as stateless can bring a residence permit, identity papers, a Convention Travel Document, and — under Article 32 of the 1954 Convention, which asks states to facilitate the naturalisation of stateless persons — a route to a nationality.
A number of states — Germany and Austria among them — require you to give up your existing nationality before or as you naturalise. Some procedures leave an applicant briefly with none. This is chosen statelessness, it is lawful, and it is by far the commonest kind.
Every benefit above except the last two comes from losing a particular nationality — not from having none.
Acquire a second nationality first and claims I through IV are yours in full: the tax liability ends, the conscription ends, the hostile state loses its handle on you, and you have refused what you meant to refuse. You also keep the ability to enter a country. Statelessness is not the mechanism that delivers any of it. It is the price paid by people who skip the first step, and the price is charged separately from the benefit.
Claim V is real but points the other way: those protections exist to repair statelessness in people who already have it, and they depend on standing in one of the minority of states with a procedure that works. As section 04 sets out, Germany has none. Claim VI is the one straightforwardly good case — and it is measured in weeks, inside a process designed to end it.
There is also a question of whether it is permitted at all. Article 7 of the 1961 Convention requires that renunciation not take effect until another nationality is held or acquired, and most European states have written that into their own law. In much of Europe you cannot renounce into statelessness even if you wish to; where a state does allow it, it is the exception.
Six things, none of which is a nationality. They are offered to any stateless person who asks, whether or not they wish to become a citizen of the Kingdom, and nothing on this page costs anything.
Your name as you give it, the date, your account of where you were born and to whom, in your own words and in whatever detail you have. Entered under a permanent reference and kept. For a person no state counts, an institution that does is not a small thing — and a record made today is evidence later, when someone finally asks you to account for the years.
An attestation of who you are and that you are known here, under seal, with a reference anyone can check with the Chancery. Where your identity can be verified against documents it is verified and says so; where it cannot — which is the ordinary case for a stateless person — it is issued on your own account and says that too. A document that demanded papers would be no use to the people who need it most.
On your request, in writing, direct to whoever needs to hear it: a lawyer, an authority, a hospital, a school, a landlord, an employer. That you are known to this Church, since when, under what reference, and what we can and cannot confirm. It carries no legal force. It is a corroborating voice from a named institution with an address, which for someone holding nothing is a beginning.
An officer of the Secretariat with you at appointments where you are permitted a companion; help preparing what you need to say and assembling what you have; an interpreter where the Church can find one; correspondence written on your behalf. This is what the Embassy can honestly offer in place of the consular help a national would get from their own country — and it is offered for exactly that reason.
The most important thing on this list, and the one the Embassy is least able to substitute for. Statelessness cases are won by specialist lawyers and by the organisations that litigate them. The Secretariat maintains contacts with the statelessness bar, with members of the European Network on Statelessness, and with UNHCR, and will make an introduction and write the covering letter. Ask for this first, not last.
Pastoral care, the sacraments, and a body of people scattered across countries who will know your name. And where you want it — never without your consent, and never with your details — the Embassy will say publicly what statelessness does to people, because the condition survives partly on the fact that almost nobody is looking at it.
None of this ends your statelessness. It is meant to make the years until something does less solitary, better documented, and better lawyered than they would otherwise be.
Set out at length rather than in a footnote, because a stateless person who acts on a false promise loses more than anybody else does.
Do not make yourself stateless. Not for tax, not for freedom, not for principle.
It is marketed as an escape and it is the opposite of one. Without a nationality you have no right to enter any country, including the one you are standing in; no passport and no consulate; and in much of Europe, as section 04 sets out, not even a procedure by which to be recognised as what you have become. The 1961 Convention exists specifically so that renunciation cannot take effect until another nationality is held — that requirement is not red tape, it is the guardrail.
If you have come to this page from End EU-Citizenship or Perpetual Traveling, that is the sentence from both of them repeated here in full: every lawful route requires a second nationality first, and the requirement is the point.
Write. It costs nothing, it commits you to nothing, and you do not need a document to do it.
Say what you can: your name as you use it, where you are, where you were born if you know, what papers you hold if any, and what has happened so far. If you do not know some of it, say that — not knowing is the ordinary condition here and no part of it will be held against you. You will be answered by an officer of the Secretariat, and the first thing that answer will do is point you toward a lawyer.
Nothing on this page requires you to become a citizen of the Kingdom, to give anything, or to believe anything. If you also want to talk about that, say so and it will be answered in the same letter — but it is a separate conversation and it is never the price of this one.
inquiries@kgd-embassy.org →The Office of the Secretariat receives these at all three seats under identical procedure. No payment detail is ever requested, and no identity document is required to be heard.
The Kingdom is sovereign, and seeks the recognition of no state. Sovereignty is what it has; recognition is only what states do about one another.
The Kingdom of God is sovereign in the fullest sense the word carries. Its authority is underived — held from nothing, answerable to nothing above it, older than every jurisdiction now in existence. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me (Matthew 28:18). No state conferred it, none sustains it, and none can diminish or revoke it. It does not become true upon acknowledgement, nor false upon denial.
It is not the sovereignty of a state, and the Kingdom does not claim to be one: no statehood declared, no territory held to the exclusion of any government, no border disputed. Recognition is how states acknowledge one another’s title to a portion of the earth — and the Kingdom claims no portion, its extent being the whole.
No state has recognised it, none is asked to, and were one to extend recognition tomorrow or announce its withdrawal, nothing here would move — not the extent, not the confession, not the Register, not one office of this house, not the standing of a single person within it.
Said of us, it is said wrongly. The Kingdom’s legates carry its commission and its authority; they do not carry a state’s privileges and have no need of them. Nobody is authorised to claim, in our name, a diplomatic status, immunity, accreditation or official standing conferred by any government — nor to claim the withdrawal of what was never sought. Those a receiving state grants, one person at a time and by its own consent; this Kingdom has asked for none. Any such claim is not ours: tell the Secretariat.