1. Reported Stateless Persons
According to UNHCR’s statistics, there was only one stateless person reported in Hong Kong as of 2015. There have been some journalistic articles which suggest that there are stateless children who are born to refugees in Hong Kong. However, no official statistics or reports on this situation are available. UNHCR has noted China as a country which has information regarding stateless people but no reliable data.
2. Stateless Refugee
A newspaper article in 2016 highlighted that there are growing numbers of stateless children born to refugees in Hong Kong. Many such refugees lack identification documents, which further contributes to intergenerational statelessness. Very few refugees in Hong Kong have been approved for asylum, approving only 52 of 8,000 asylum applications made between 2009 and 2016. In 2016, 580 refugee children were said to have been denied the right to abode, leaving them unable to get jobs in or to leave Hong Kong.
