Aung Kyaw Min Tun has lived in Myanmar for all of his 24 years, his native language is Burmese, and his parents and grandparents were all born here. But he is not officially a citizen of the country he calls home and he has no idea if he ever will be.

The problem is that he is a Tamil Hindu, an ethnicity that does not fit neatly into the country’s bewilderingly complex citizenship law, in which nationality is based on membership in one of 135 so-called “national races”, which supposedly lived within the country’s boundaries before the British invaded in 1823. The law, created by Myanmar’s military dictatorship in 1982, excludes others from full citizenship but allows them to apply for two lower tiers with fewer rights.

Its heavy emphasis on ethnicity has led rights groups to call it discriminatory. It has also been enforced haphazardly and selectively, with multiple layers of bureaucracy and endemic corruption adding to the confusion. In addition, a variety of ad hoc residency and citizenship documents have been issued over the years.