eagerness to go beyond engagement with humanitarian actors and wanted more training on how to engage better with political counterparts and government actors. This evaluation found that PRM and FSO staff at country level should receive more guidance on the importance of PRM’s statelessness mandate, more training, and clearer signals from Washington on how to better target their efforts on statelessness. 5.1.4 U.S. Diplomacy Multilateral diplomacy. U.S. multilateral engagement related to statelessness has largely been through the Group of Friends, the HLS, the HRC, and other multilateral fora. The Group of Friends is made up of twenty-six members—key governments that work closely with UNHCR to assist in the implementation of the #IBelong Campaign.20 There is a Core Group of five to six governments within the Group of Friends that rotates the chairmanship. The Group of Friends has been using strategic bilateral and multilateral pressure to meet the goals of the campaign. The U.S. was active in the Core Group from the campaign’s inception in 2015, hosting the first meeting with the U.S. Ambassador to the UN in Geneva and the U.S. Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN HRC in Geneva. The most active U.S. engagement with the Core Group and the #IBelong Campaign coincided with the period when both Ambassadors worked closely together and carried out several statelessness-related initiatives until their tenure ended in 2017. In March 2019, the U.S. announced that it would leave the Core Group but has remained committed and engaged in the broader Group of Friends, including participating in regular meetings and activities. The U.S. announced its intention to rejoin the Core Group in February 2021. Bilateral high-level diplomacy. Bilateral, high-level diplomatic engagements on statelessness evidenced through the evaluation include international missions by high-level DOS officials, including PRM’s Front Office and Regional Bureau’s Front Office, as well as Ambassadors and high-level diplomats from U.S. Embassies engaging the executive branch of country governments. High-level diplomatic engagements were very active in the Dominican Republic. The range of these engagements since 2014 included international missions by then-Vice President Joe Biden, PRM Deputy Assistant Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries, Western Hemisphere Affairs (WHA) Deputy Assistant Secretaries, and other high-ranking officials. The U.S. Ambassadors and Chargé d’Affairs were active on the issue throughout the period of evaluation. From 2014–2016, the “demand signals” from Washington to the Embassy in Santo Domingo featured the issue prominently and were coupled with close support to the Ambassador and high-level diplomats to engage and prioritize addressing statelessness, as described by one interviewee (see Box 12). Box 12: Demand Signals fromWashington “The situation in the Dominican Republic got very ugly and I know that PRM was really monitoring that very closely and engaging in particular with WHA on the issue….I think we were trying very hard to coach the ambassador’s diplomacy to ensure there was a smart humanitarian approach.” In Thailand, following a high-profile, international incident, the “stateless boys trapped in a cave,” the U.S. Ambassador at the time, used the media attention which dominated headlines around the world for weeks to raise non-refugee statelessness with the Thai government, showing that media attention on the issue can play a key role in pushing international engagement, including from DOS. Aside from this event, in Thailand there was little evidence of high-level diplomacy on non-refugee stateless persons. However, a national staff member at the U.S. Consulate in Chiang Mai had contacts, deep knowledge and understanding of the issue, but was possibly underutilized and could be a resource for advocacy on the issue within the Embassy. Overall, however the Evaluation Team learned from interviews that non-PRM U.S. Embassy FSOs were largely unaware that non-refugee stateless persons are a part of PRM’s mandate. Triangulation with information from the RefCoord survey supports this finding as one respondent shared in regard to nonPRM staff: “They don’t know it’s a real priority or their role.” Nepal did have some strong examples of 20 The governments include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Finland, Guatemala, Ireland, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the United States, Uruguay, and Zambia. 12