The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced on Friday that more than half a million people have acquired nationality since the launch of its campaign to solve the problem of statelessness ten years ago.
In a report published in Geneva, the UNHCR outlined the progress made since the 2014 launch of the #IBelong campaign, which aims to mobilise international action to address statelessness.
The UNHCR described statelessness as a "major violation of human rights." It marginalises people politically and economically, makes them particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, and denies them access to essential services.
In 2023, the UNHCR reported 4.4 million stateless individuals, while emphasising that millions more were affected as available data covered only half of the world's countries.
The campaign, which concludes this year, aims to address "a largely invisible crisis of millions of people living in the shadows, without nationality, unable to assert their most basic human rights," said Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Although "significant progress" has been made to end this situation, "our work is not yet complete," Grandi added.
The report noted that "more than 565,900 stateless and people of undetermined nationality have acquired nationality" over the past ten years.
