Better Must Come naturalisation; ensure birth registration for the prevention of statelessness; issue nationality documentation to those with entitlement to it; accede to the UN Statelessness Conventions; 29 and improve quantitative and qualitative data on stateless populations. 30 Not only are these ‘Actions’ guided by an eight-part overall strategy, each Action has milestones to be reached by 2017 and 2020, and an ultimate goal to be met by 2024. In support of these measures, the UNHCR’s budget for resolving statelessness was quintupled between 2009 and 2014, a special mechanism was created to provide increased funding for particularly promising and important projects and more than 20 specialists have been deployed globally to work with governments and relevant organisations to address this issue. 31 To accomplish the Actions, countries are encouraged to develop and implement National Action Plans that ‘set out detailed strategies to complete selected Actions and indicate detailed country-level goals and milestones’, with progress on these Plans assessed by the UNHCR in two-year intervals. 32 The Campaign is further complemented by quarterly Campaign updates, a series of ‘Good Practices Papers’ to aid governments, civil society, the UNHCR and other international organisations implement the Global Action Plan, and an Open Letter to End Statelessness on the Campaign’s website. 33 With respect to Campaign content, the Campaign’s inaugural report states that ‘stateless people want nothing more than to come in from the cold — to belong’, 34 and although ‘it is unclear how many of the humanitarian emergencies [the UNHCR is] working in today can be resolved in the near future’, 35 the Campaign is guided by the belief that statelessness can be resolved for at least 10 million people who are currently without a nationality within 10 years. In fact, the #IBELONG Campaign claims that statelessness ‘can be resolved in a single moment’. 36 Yet, the legal resolution of statelessness may or may not translate into that which the stateless desire most — belonging — and it is the chasm between citizenship and belonging, or rather, the assumption that the former necessarily entails the latter, that this Campaign has left unaddressed. Recent events in Sri Lanka present a unique opportunity to appraise citizenship and belonging after statelessness, for the 2003 Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin Act No 35 and the subsequent Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin (Amendment) Act No 6 of 2009 saw the country’s long stateless UpCountry Tamil population acquire citizenship en masse. 37 Not unlike the optimism expressed in the #IBELONG Campaign, these developments have been hailed as 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960); Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, opened for signature 30 August 1961, 989 UNTS 175 (entered into force 13 December 1975). Global Action Plan (n 28). ibid ibid 26. ibid; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The Campaign to End Statelessness, January 2015 Update (Campaign Report, January 2015) <https://www.refworld.org/docid/54cb79b04.html> (‘2015 Campaign Update’); United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, ‘IBELONG’ (Webpage) <http://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/>. UNHCR Special Report (n 3) 16. 2015 Campaign Update (n 33) 3. UNHCR Special Report (n 3) 20. Yogeswary Vijayapalan, Endless Inequality: The Rights of the Plantation Tamils in Sri Lanka (Ohm Books 2014). 11