Refugees International 155 (ExCom) members, donor governments and sister UN agencies placed no priority on this sizeable segment of the UN’s persons of concern. Similarly, first phone calls made at that time to the U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (BPRM), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and large international human rights/relief organizations led to an endless cycle of trying to find a contact point, much less relevant information about country-specific groups of stateless people. In short, the stateless were, as UNHCR’s future High Commissioner Antonio Guterres would later call them, ‘the ultimate forgotten people’.3 Refugees International Takes on Statelessness (2005 to 2007) It was in this context that RI decided to investigate the issue of statelessness in greater depth, investing staff time and resources into a multi-region field visit to gather evidence about the 21st century version of the problem. In stark contrast to most RI missions at the time, which were focused on large-scale refugee outflows or other emergencies, there were no pre-existing humanitarian infrastructures or introductions to utilize in the case of stateless groups. Every meaningful relationship with relevant government officials, UN representatives, local legal experts, and most importantly with members of the stateless communities, had to be identified and built up from scratch. In 2005, RI issued Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness, the first report of its kind published by an NGO.4 It highlighted field studies of statelessness in Bangladesh, Estonia, and the United Arab Emirates and featured a global survey with descriptions of statelessness in more than 70 other countries. The report and a companion op-ed, which was published in The International Herald Tribune,5 generated a respectable amount of media attention. RI’s initial and very conservative estimate of 11 million stateless people worldwide was soon being cited by the UN and other groups. Meanwhile 3 UNHCR, ‘New handbook on statelessness addresses 11 million “forgotten” people’ (October 2005) <www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/search?page=search&docid=4357b7384&query =statelessness> accessed 24 October 2013. 4 M Lynch, ‘Lives on Hold: The Human Costs of Statelessness’ (Refugees International Report, February 2005); The Economist ‘Statelessness: It’s Tough to Live in Limbo’ (The Economist, 29 November 2007) <www.economist.com/world/international/dis-playstory.cfm?story _id=10219923> accessed 5 October 2013. 5 M Lynch, ‘The People Who Have No Country (…)’ (New York Times, 18 February 2005) <www .nytimes.com/2005/02/17/opinion/17iht-edlynch.html?_r=0> accessed on 23 October 2013. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 153-162