Adriana Mejía Hernández (far right), Vice-Minister of Multilateral Affairs of Colombia, is recognised by UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo
Grandi, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, and UN Office of Legal Affairs representative Arancha Hinojal, for Colombia’s accession
to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. © UNHCR/Jean Marc Ferré
Interview with the
High Commissioner
the #IBelong Campaign in 2024. Eswatini and Liberia
have committed to removing gender discrimination
from their nationality laws so that mothers can confer
their nationality to their children on the same basis
as fathers. Other States - Central African Republic,
Eswatini and Nigeria - made pledges relating to the
removal of spousal-related gender discrimination.
Over 20 States have pledged to establish dedicated
statelessness determination procedures, which will
allow stateless people to have a formal legal status
and enjoy the rights to which they are entitled until
they acquire a nationality. And more than 30 States
having committed to collect better qualitative and
quantitative data on stateless persons within the next
5 years – measures which will dramatically improve
the information we have on stateless people. More
than 100 more pledges were made by 11 international
and regional organizations and 22 civil society
organizations.
UNHCR convened a High-Level Segment on
Statelessness to mark the mid-point of the
#IBelong Campaign and to give renewed
impetus to the Campaign – how do you
evaluate the results of the event?
I’m very pleased and impressed by the total number
of pledges – over 350 confirmed in writing, all of
which will feed into the Global Forum on Refugees.
It’s particularly notable that over 65 States made
pledges to address statelessness, showing the
widespread strong political will and commitment
to the goal of the #IBelong Campaign to eradicate
statelessness.
Some of the pledges, such as those by Kenya,
Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Turkmenistan are very
significant, as each of these States committed to
completely resolving all cases of statelessness on
their territories, in almost all cases before the end of
Apart from these important commitments, the
High-Level Segment also gave an important
opportunity to States to talk about some of the
successes they have already secured in addressing
3