Over half a million people without a nationality have obtained citizenship, according to a UN report released on Friday, ten years after the organization began its campaign to eliminate the status of statelessness.
The UN agency for refugees published a report outlining the advancements achieved since the inception of its #IBelong campaign in 2014. Its objective was to galvanize global action to address the issue of statelessness.
Statelessness was deemed “a major human rights violation” by the UNHCR.
According to the organization, it makes people economically and politically marginalized, unable to obtain essential services, and especially open to abuse and exploitation.
The UNHCR stated that although there were 4.4 million stateless persons officially registered last year, millions more were impacted because the data only included people from around half of the world’s nations.
“A largely invisible crisis: that of millions of people around the world living in the shadows, without a nationality, unable to assert their most basic human rights” was the focus of the campaign, which comes to an end this year, according to UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi.
As he praised “significant progress” made toward the challenging objective of putting an end to statelessness, he also stated that “our work is not yet done”.
According to the report, during the previous ten years, “more than 565,900 stateless people and persons with undetermined nationality gained nationality.”
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