Chapter 7 Internally displaced persons IDPs are people who have been forced to leave or abandon their homes, and have not crossed an internationally recognized border. People flee within their own countries to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural- and humanmade disasters. UNHCR compiles data only on conflict-generated IDPs to whom the organization extends protection and/or assistance. As such, UNHCR statistics do not provide a complete overview of global internal displacement. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) maintains a database on IDPs displaced due to violence and conflict, as well as due to disasters, providing a more comprehensive picture of global internal displacement. For the purpose of analysing global forced displacement, figures quoted in this report match the numbers on IDPs displaced by conflict or violence as reported in IDMC’s Global Report on Forced Displacement 2020.79 Data on IDPs comes from a wide range of methods and data compilers from NGOs to government offices, with methods including among others displacement tracking, household surveys, censuses and profiling exercises. UNHCR compiles figures on persons under its statelessness mandate for two population groups. The first are persons who meet the statelessness definition in the 1954 Convention because they are not considered as nationals of any State. The second group are persons with undetermined nationality, a population group for which UNHCR collects data in response to To identify stateless persons and develop reliable methods for statelessness estimation, it is important to recognize the different causes of statelessness. Nationality laws that are inconsistent with international standards and state succession are responsible for a significant proportion of today’s known global stateless population. Migration, nomadism and forced displacement are additional potential causes of statelessness. Data on stateless persons is collected and compiled using a wide variety of methods including demographic and statistical estimates derived from survey and census data, administrative registers and data from statelessness determination procedures. 79 https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2020/ 80 UNHCR Executive Committee 56th session, Conclusion on Identification, Prevention and Reduction of Statelessness and Protection of Stateless Persons No. 106 (LVII) – 2006, available at: https://www.unhcr.org/excom/exconc/453497302/conclusionidentification-prevention-reduction-statelessness-protection.html 81 See technical paper “UNHCR Statistical Reporting on Statelessness” for details. https://www.unhcr.org/statistics/unhcrstats/5d9e182e7/ unhcr-statistical-reporting-statelessness.html Stateless persons 70 Executive Committee Conclusion No. 106 from 2006. 80 While a formal definition of a person with undetermined nationality does not exist, UNHCR uses the working definition of a person who lacks proof of possession of any nationality and who at the same time has or is perceived as having important links to more than one State. Persons with undetermined nationality have in many cases a migratory history that leads to an unresolved nationality status. UNHCR previously also reported on de facto stateless populations but discontinued doing so in mid-2019 based on an assessment that de facto statelessness was often incorrectly used to refer to people who meet the statelessness definition in the 1954 Convention and who should therefore be reported as such. Over the past decade, these concepts and definitions have sometimes been applied inconsistently by UNHCR country operations for the annual statistical reporting process. 81 It is therefore challenging to compare statelessness figures across different countries or even to compare figures in the same country for different years. UNHCR > GLOBAL TRENDS 2019