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It’s one of the infrequent rituals that punctuate life growing up. Every ten years, a new passport photograph brings much derision from family and friends, unsmiling as I am staring into the photobooth camera. “ I wouldn’t let you in” is the more typical remark – bringing the luxury of humour to a person who has always had a passport, a birth certificate and ample proof that I am who I say I am. Yesterday, the United Nations Refugee Agency published a report to highlight the fact that there are as many as 10 million people in the world who are stateless. Living without a passport in the drawer, or a birth certificate in an envelope somewhere is a serious problem in a world where proof of our identity is asked for almost every day. Huge global developments such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 have had catastrophic effects on families; 370,000 ethnic Russians have no nationality in Estonia and Latvia for example. And many more are fleeing Syria and Iraq without birth certificates, families wrenched apart with no proof of who they are or where they belong. And it’s worse for women: in 27 countries mothers are not legally permitted to pass on their nationality to their children. In the UK, the exhaustion of living this life was described by one stateless man who said it was like being a bird with nowhere to rest on the ground, but which can’t spend his whole life in the sky (source UNHCR report on Statelessness published 04/11/14) One of the most powerful aspects of the crucifixion of Jesus was that he was executed outside the city walls. Jesus became therefore a non-citizen, a person of no acknowledged identity. For Christians, this scandalous aspect of the gospel story means that there is an inviolable and irreducible worth in every human being, dignified by God’s movement from divinity to criminality, according to the rules of the state. Which is why statelessness is much more than a mix up over documents or the inevitable consequence of administering complex modern bureaucracies. It is a debilitating and dehumanising price that is paid by many of the poorest people in the world; whose lives are destroyed by the titans that clash above their heads. For many of us, the covenant between ourselves as citizens and the state’s benign protection is something we never examine. For the stateless among us, theirs is a ghostly existence, unable to work or travel, learn or settle, not really knowing if anyone will ever picture and recognise their face.