Thida Arngee was stateless until four years ago when her uncle helped her to attain Thai nationality. She was 14 years old. Her parents and brother are still stateless. ‘The best thing about having Thai nationality is that I don’t have to be scared when I travel. Now that I have an ID card, I am not scared that I might be arrested when I pass checkpoints.’ Thailand is home to over 500,000 stateless people who are largely concentrated in remote areas in border or mountainous provinces like Chiang Rai. VI. STATELESS PERSONS S tatelessness, the situation when a person does not have the nationality of any country, restricts the enjoyment of fundamental human, social, and political rights, such as access to education, health care and freedom of movement. UNHCR estimates that at least 10 million people globally are stateless, while the current statistical data cover 3.7 million stateless persons in 78 countries. Collecting comprehensive data on stateless populations presents a particular challenge because stateless individuals frequently live in precarious situations on the margins of society. Identifying stateless people, however, remains key to addressing the difficulties they face and to enabling the efforts of governments, UNHCR, and others to prevent and reduce statelessness. In November 2014, UNHCR launched the #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness and its accompanying Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 20142024. The plan sets out a guiding framework of 10 actions to be taken to end statelessness within 10 years. Successful implementation of the plan requires improved baseline population data, and two of the plan’s actions relate to the identification of stateless persons and to improving data on the situation of stateless people. Various methods may be used to gather data on stateless people, including civil registries, surveys, 46 UNHCR Global Trends 2015 © UNHCR / Roger Arnold and population censuses. Population censuses are a particularly important source of data, given that they are intended to enumerate the entire population of a country and the majority of countries implement a census approximately once a decade. The United Nations’ recommendations on population censuses underscore the importance of including questions related to citizenship and on statelessness.46 Where countries have published statistics on stateless people derived from their censuses, such data have been included in this report. In addition, UNHCR collaborates with the different parts of the United Nations, in particular at the regional level, to further refine these recommendations on stateless persons for the 2020 World Population and Housing Census Programme. An increasing number of countries are now including these questions in their censuses, which they are carrying out under the 2020 World Population and Housing Census Programme. Together with increased data collection – including disaggregated data as well as improved birth registration targets under both the Global Action Plan to End Statelessness and 46 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistics Division: Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses, Revision 2, New York, 2008. See http://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/seriesm/ seriesm_67rev2e.pdf.