Stateless Children in Pakistan

UNHCR estimates about 4.2 million children are stateless in the world and Pakistan is no exception. Pakistan, the country of migrants, has thousands of stateless children: Kashmiri, Afghani and Rohingya children are some of the examples but the country still unable to accommodate these children. This paper articulates the state of the art, selected through systematic review of the existing body of knowledge. It shed light on the plight of the global stateless children. By using the ESCI articles, analyzing it in MAX QDA, NVivo, it was revealed that birth registration, laws related to the parental nationality, conflict and violence were some of the reasons of the stateless children. These children were desperate for their identity, existence, and recognition in the society. It was found that these children were Not in Education, Employment and in Training (NEET). They were without life skills. These children were hapless, without future perspectives, without their identity and recognition. These stateless children were either on streets or off the streets (in home, concentrated places or in custody). It seems imperative to analyze this phenomenon with the child centric Lense as well as human rights lenses and understand the subjective wellbeing of the stateless children. This phenomenon is without the territorial and regional boundaries and needs attentions of the global scholarship and intellectual insight.