The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is mandated to prevent and reduce statelessness and protect the rights of stateless persons. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is mandated is to promote and protect all human rights for all persons, including stateless persons. These mandates are thus complementary and the two UN agencies work together to highlight the issue and develop common and cooperative strategies to ameliorate the situation of stateless persons in the MENA region. Legal Framework Statelessness can be categorized into: a) de jure statelessness as defined in article 1 of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. b) de facto statelessness, including persons who formally possess a nationality but where it is ineffective. The rights of stateless persons are enunciated in a number of international instruments. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) guarantees the right to a nationality as a fundamental human right. Specific standards designed to ensure the right to a nationality are set out in the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and, to a lesser degree, in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, the primary focus of which is to ensure minimum standards of treatment for persons who are already stateless. The civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights of stateless persons are enunciated in other international human rights instruments signed and ratified by many States. These include, inter alia the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. Several General Assembly resolutions also provide additional safeguards and the concluding observations of treaty bodies as well as their decisions on individual complaints have tackled statelessness repeatedly. At the regional level, the right to a nationality is recognized in the Covenant on the Rights of the Child in Islam, in the new Arab Charter on Human Rights (art. 29) and has also been emphasized by the Asian-African Legal Consultative Organisation (AALCO). The domestic legislation of some States in the region seeks to prevent statelessness and several States have taken steps to eliminate legislative loopholes leading to statelessness. While it is possible to identify a number of good practices by States, as well as useful input from lawyers or NGOs supporting stateless persons, as noted above, safeguards in national legislation tend to be incomplete and efforts need to be carried out in all countries, preferably in a concerted manner, as some situations or categories transcend State borders. A regional research process To address these issues the UNHCR and OHCHR regional presences in Beirut and at headquarters shared responsibility for organizing and funding a research-action process. As a first step, the two agencies commissioned two studies to be undertaken by independent experts, which would bring together existing information on the issue and 3