Communications & Awareness-Raising Work With the support of seed funding from the Open Society Foundations, ENS developed and launched its website in June 2012. Since then various forms of social media have been deployed to reach new audiences across Europe. Our quarterly newsletter and weekly blog provide opinion and analysis of current developments to our mailing list of over 300 subscribers, and through the strategic use of social media to many hundreds or thousands more. For more in-depth analysis we will continue to collate and provide relevant resources on our website in order to support advocacy by our members and other stakeholders. These reports, policy briefs and other items have been carefully selected from the wider body of available resources, due to their specific relevance to problems of statelessness in Europe. As part of its awareness-raising efforts, in December 2012 ENS marked International Human Rights Day by issuing a public statement calling for greater inclusion of stateless persons in Europe and around the world. The statement was widely publicised by ENS, translated into four languages and received prominent media attention in Italy and Denmark. Working in Partnership & Looking to the Future ENS works in partnership with other organisations and institutions. We support and encourage international and regional organisations – like the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and UNHCR – to address statelessness within their respective mandates. Given a previous relative lack of understanding and attention towards statelessness issues among civil society and other actors, an immediate priority and expected short term impact will be to raise awareness among these key constituencies. It is expected that the impact of this increased awareness will create political space and help make the case for necessary law and policy reform. This work will build on momentum through other intergovernmental processes such as the UNHCR pledging process initiated at its Ministerial Meeting in Geneva in December 2011 and through the September 2012 High-Level Rule of Law meeting during the General Assembly in New York where the EU pledged that all Member States would accede to the 1954 Statelessness Convention and consider acceding to the 1961 Statelessness Convention. This has set a clear agenda for Europe in terms of the integration of key international standards into national laws across the region – a process which ENS will seek to influence at every opportunity. As this impetus for change grows, ENS’s ability to provide technical advice and assistance will help strengthen existing and nascent protection mechanisms. In the short to medium term, and as more European states amend their legislation and introduce national statelessness determination procedures, the Network’s capacity building functions will enable NGOs and lawyers to be fully equipped to ensure that stateless persons receive the protection to which they are entitled under international law. The European Network on Statelessness is coordinated by Asylum Aid Club Union House, 253-254 Upper Street, London N1 1RY, UK | www.statelessness.eu

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