West Africa HIGHLIGHTS OF PROMOTION EFFORTS àà Coordinated and sustained activities to promote accession to the Statelessness Conventions throughout the 2011 commemorations year included high-level letters sent by the Assistant High CommissionerProtection that were followed up by UNHCR’s Regional Representation for West Africa (RRWA) in Dakar at the national levels. àà UNHCR’s Regional Representative sent notes verbales to all governments in the region in May 2011. A training session on statelessness was included for the first time in the annual summer course on human rights and refugee law held in Cotonou, Benin in July 2011. A three-day awareness-raising seminar on statelessness for government, civil-society and UNHCR representatives from nine Francophone West African countries was held in Dakar, Senegal, in November 2011. àà These efforts resulted in the highest number of pledges related to statelessness of all UNHCR regional representations at the 2011 Ministerial Meeting, including seven States that pledged to accede to one or both of the Statelessness Conventions, five States pledging reform of nationality laws to prevent statelessness, one State that pledged to improve the provision of civil registration to prevent statelessness and one pledged to undertake a study on statelessness. àà Nigeria and Benin acceded to both Statelessness Conventions in 2011 and Burkina Faso acceded to the 1954 Statelessness Convention in 2012. In 2013, Côte d’Ivoire acceded to both Statelessness Conventions, while Gambia deposited its instruments of accession to both Conventions in 2014. The same year, Guinea acceded to the 1961 Convention and Niger to the 1954 Convention. Further progress in fulfilling additional pledges on accession is ongoing. àà A series of UNHCR-convened regional meetings and seminars since 2012 have led to strong resolutions and appeals to address statelessness. Building momentum through UNHCR’s Regional Representation for West Africa in Dakar The 2011 commemorations efforts saw UNHCR’s RRWA achieve considerable success in promoting accession to the Statelessness Conventions. The West Africa sub-region also counted the highest number of States making statelessness related pledges at the December 2011 Ministerial Meeting. Of the 15 countries covered by the RRWA, six (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Togo) pledged to accede to both the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions. Guinea, which was already a State party to the 1954 Convention, submitted a pledge to accede to the 1961 Statelessness Convention. The first State to accede to the Statelessness Conventions in the region was Nigeria, whose President personally deposited his country’s instruments of accession to both Conventions at the United Nations Annual Treaty Event in New York in September 2011. Nigeria’s lead in this regard may have encouraged other ECOWAS States to follow suit. This success in promoting State commitment to address statelessness by acceding to the two Statelessness Conventions and an additional array of measures was the direct result of sustained advocacy in 2011 by the RRWA, combined with follow-up activities at the national level. In March 2011, UNHCR’s Assistant High CommissionerProtection (AHC-P) sent letters to all governments in the region encouraging them to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Statelessness Convention by acceding to one or both of the Statelessness Conventions. The Regional Representative at RRWA followed up with notes verbales to government counterparts in the region on the importance of acceding to the Conventions. This combined outreach was successful in raising awareness of statelessness at the appropriate political levels in the governments in the region. 8 CAMPAIGN TO END STATELESSNESS WITHIN 10 YE ARS