Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals Better data on statelessness Data are the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability. Without high-quality data providing the right information on the right things at the right time; designing, monitoring and evaluating effective policies becomes almost impossible.187 One reason why stateless persons are overlooked by development initiatives is that those who lack a registered legal identity, including stateless persons, are often administratively invisible. Efforts to strengthen civil registration systems are important for planning and data collection, in addition to the role of civil registration in establishing official recognition of legal identity (see the section Legal identity, below).188 However, people without a recognized nationality may appear in civil registers without their real or potential statelessness being recorded or noted in any way. There is scope for much better use of administrative data to estimate the number of people who may be stateless (see, for example, the case study on Nepal in the box (J) on page 52). Nonetheless, additional forms of data collection are likely to be needed, including to understand the impacts of statelessness on those affected. Good quality data are the foundation of development planning: ending “data deprivation” is critical to the task of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.189 The imperative is not just to collect more data: “What will be far more revolutionary will be to create the right sort of data, and thereby information that will allow the right questions to be asked and answered, and to make them accessible, usable and verifiable.”190 This entails a focus on the particular vulnerabilities of marginalized groups – among whom the stateless are often the most marginalized. In order to resolve statelessness, it is important to understand the causes and the impacts, as well as the magnitude of the problem. The Highland Peoples’ Survey in Thailand (see box (G) on page 36), still perhaps the most extensive research into such vulnerabilities after almost 20 years, illustrates the “need for pairing survey data with ethnographic research” to design programmes that address the barriers to essential services among communities in which statelessness is prevalent.191 In light of the overall SDG objective to ensure that no one is left behind, SDG Target 17.18 calls for capacitybuilding to enable countries to produce data “disaggregated by income, gender, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographical location and other characteristics relevant in national contexts”. More work is needed to ensure that the indicators used to monitor progress are sufficient to capture the situation of those most likely to be missing from official statistics – including stateless persons.192 The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) proposes a set of six principles for a human-rights-based approach to data, also emphasizing data disaggregation as well as participation, self-identification, transparency, privacy and accountability.193 187. Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, “A world that counts: mobilising the data revolution for sustainable development”, E/ESCAP/CST(4)/INF/6 (Bangkok: United Nations, November 2014), www.undatarevolution.org/report/. 188. UN Statistics Division, “Principles and recommendations for a vital statistics system, revision 3”, Statistical Papers, Series M (New York: United Nations, 2014), 3, http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/standmeth/principles/M19Rev3en.pdf; Carla AbouZahr et al., “Civil registration and vital statistics: progress in the data revolution for counting and accountability”, The Lancet, Counting births and deaths, 386 (11 May 2015): 1373–85, http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60173-8. 189. Umar Serajuddin et al., “Data deprivation: another deprivation to end”, WPS 7252 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, April 2015), http://documents. worldbank.org/curated/en/700611468172787967/Data-deprivation-another-deprivation-to-end. 190. Elizabeth Stuart et al., “The data revolution: finding the missing millions” (London: Overseas Development Institute, 2015), 8, https://odi.org/en/ publications/the-data-revolution-finding-the-missing-millions/. 191. Flaim et al., “The UNESCO highland peoples surveys”. 192. Inga T. Winkler and Margaret L. Satterthwaite, “Leaving no one behind? persistent inequalities in the SDGs”, International Journal of Human Rights 21, No. 8 (2017): 1073–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2017.1348702. 193. OHCHR, “A human rights based approach to data – leaving no one behind in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: guidance note to data collection and disaggregation” (United Nations, January 2018), www.ohchr.org/en/documents/tools-and-resources/human-rights-based-approachdata-leaving-no-one-behind-2030-agenda. 50