Ahead of the High-Level Segment on Statelessness, 14 Oct 2024 The European Network on Statelessness i (ENS) is a civil society alliance of over 180 organisations and individuals working to promote the right to a nationality in 41 countries in Europe. ENS connects stateless people, their communities, and organisations and experts from across Europe with a shared dedication to breaking the cycle of statelessness and realising everyone’s right to a nationality. We aim to reach our goals by enabling collective action in three areas: law and policy development, awareness-raising, and capacity-building. Ahead of the High-Level Segment on Statelessness (HLS) taking place during UNHCR’s Executive Committee Meeting in Geneva on 14 October 2024, this briefing provides an overview of statelessness in Europe and makes recommendations for future action. The HLS will mark the end of UNHCR’s #IBelong Campaign and formally launch the new Global Alliance to End Statelessness ii. The Global Alliance is a UNHCR-led collaborative multistakeholder initiative with the vision to create ‘a world free from statelessness where everyone enjoys the right to a nationality without discrimination’. It is part of the UN Secretary General’s ‘Common Agenda’ and aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. Given its significant potential to unlock much-needed reform, this briefing highlights the opportunities to leverage the Global Alliance to support efforts to address statelessness in Europe. At least half a million people in Europe are denied their right to a nationality and other human rights. There is a lack of awareness and political will to address this issue, often rooted in discrimination. As a result, the risk of statelessness is perpetuated, and people who are stateless face significant barriers to fulfilling their rights and living their lives in full. This is a loss not only to individuals affected but also to communities and society as a whole. Statelessness occurs in Europe both among recent migrants and refugees, and among people who have lived in the same place for generations, such as non-citizens in the Baltic States and many Romani people who remain at risk of statelessness, including due to widespread antigypsyism. While statistics give an indication of the scale of statelessness in the region, data is sparse and often incomplete. Statelessness remains, therefore, a relatively hidden phenomenon. This is particularly so in a migratory context where most European countries frequently encounter stateless people in their asylum systems, making this a key issue that lawmakers – as well as officials implementing the response to people seeking protection on the ground – must seek to better understand and address. Among the stateless people living in Europe today are individuals who arrived seeking international protectioniii and were either stateless prior to leaving their country of origin or have since become stateless. According to Eurostat, on average, around 3% of first-time asylum applicants to the European Economic Area each year are recorded as being stateless or of ‘unknown nationality’. This is very likely to be an underestimate due to limited awareness, capacity, and tools to accurately identify and record statelessness in the migratory context. A high proportion of refugees come from countries (such as Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan, among others) where, as a result of discrimination in nationality