Sometimes referred to as "legal ghosts", stateless people are not recognised as nationals by any country. They live deprived of basic rights most people take for granted.
The charity Asylum Aid estimates several thousand stateless people are living in Britain, often at risk of destitution, exploitation and prolonged detention. Some were born in countries that do not recognise them as nationals, others have fled war or rights abuses, or are victims of trafficking. Britain is one of only a handful of countries to have set up a procedure to identify stateless people, and provide them with a route to legal residency. But Asylum Aid said there was a backlog of applications, and even those recognised as stateless faced difficulties acquiring British citizenship.
The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) has launched an ambitious campaign to end the plight of some 10 million stateless people worldwide by 2024.
Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, the UNHCR's representative in Britain, said "For people without a nationality, life is on hold."
American photographer Greg Constantine has spent a decade photographing stateless communities around the world including the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Roma in Europe and the Bidoon in Kuwait. He said the isolation experienced by stateless people in Britain was unlike anything he had seen before.
"What for me was so eye-opening was the sheer sense of rejection and isolation that stateless people in the UK expressed to me," Greg explains. "And how paralyzing that feeling was for them in their day to day lives."
Constantine was particularly moved by a bright young Bidoon man who was keen to study and have a career.
"I'm trying to apply for work but I'm not allowed," the man says in a caption accompanying a photo of his shadow. "I want to go to university ... but I'm not allowed. I've tried to get a driver's license, but I'm not allowed." The man said he had spent years in limbo in Britain, which has refused him asylum but cannot deport him because Kuwait has rejected him as a citizen. "It is like a spider web," he added. "I am trapped and any move I make, I get stuck even more."
Constantine said most of the stateless people he met had been detained, sometimes multiple times. One man had spent three and a half years locked up. Others were homeless - one had ended up living in a forest. Constantine said one of the most tragic aspects of statelessness was the way it destroyed a person's self-worth.
A 27-year-old Kurdish woman born in Syria described how "You are not seen as a person. I felt like I didn't exist because I was not recognised anywhere."
A man describes his feelings of entrapment as life passes him by. "I'm like a bird in a cage," he says. "All I can do is watch."
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