to be of urgent concern, will not always be visible in global statistics, because these cover populations that are stateless during the reporting period and not (also) populations that are at risk. At the time of writing this statistical note, an ongoing citizenship verification process in Assam, India, may leave several million people stateless. It is at crucial junctures such as this in the determination or review of people’s citizenship status that attention and resources need to be (re)directed to ensure appropriate efforts can be taken – including to deliver on the Global Action Plan to End Statelessness, which includes such actions as “Prevent denial, loss or deprivation of nationality on discriminatory grounds” (Action 4) and “Issue nationality documentation to those with entitlement to it” (Action 8). Painting a global picture of statelessness and understanding what forms of engagement are needed where, is necessarily a task that will only ever be partly informed by global statelessness statistics. Technical note & glossary The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) releases statistics on the scale of the problem of forced displacement worldwide in its annual Global Trends reports. Since 2004, these reports have included data on statelessness. UNHCR is the only body that systematically collates and publishes figures for the number of stateless persons globally. The data itself is drawn from a range of sources, including both government data and statistics gathered through UN, academic or civil society data collection. Within its statistical reporting on statelessness, UNHCR uses two different symbols to indicate where data is absent: An asterisk (*) is used to mark countries where UNHCR has information about stateless persons but no reliable data. A dash (-) is used to mark countries where there is no data or the value is zero. For more on how UNHCR compiles and reports data on statelessness, as well as more generally on the challenges of measuring statelessness, see Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless, 2014, available at http://www.institutesi.org/worldsstateless.pdf; and Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, ‘Counting the world’s stateless: reflections on statistical reporting on statelessness’ in UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2013, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/54cf99f29.pdf. 8