Stateless Persons In terms of absolute numbers, most of the persons UNHCR reports as falling within its statelessness mandate can be found in Asia and the Pacific (1.4 million reported). Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, which come in second and third, respectively, both report approximately half the number of stateless persons found in Asia and the Pacific. The latter also has the highest reported number of countries significantly affected by statelessness. Numerically, statelessness affects the least number of individuals in the Americas (210,000 persons reported), where jus soli conferral of nationality to all children born in state territory helps to prevent statelessness from arising or spreading. Statelessness is the most thoroughly mapped in Europe (670,000 persons reported), where UNHCR does not indicate any significant stateless populations for which it does not have a figure. WHAT CURRENT STATISTICAL REPORTING ON STATELESSNESS DOES NOT SHOW 60 UNHCR, Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014–2024. 61 See introductory note of Annex Table 7. 62 Around 2,000 persons are registered as stateless in the population registers in the Netherlands, but a further 80,000+ are registered as being of ‘unknown nationality’, in part due to procedural difficulties in establishing statelessness for the purposes of registration. Advisory Committee for Migration Affairs, No country of one’s own. An Advisory Report on treaty protection for stateless persons in the Netherlands, December 2013, English summary available at: http://www.acvz.org/ publicaties/summaryREPORT39.pdf. 63 See further below. 64 According to the footnotes in Annex Table 7, several of the figures included in this Yearbook were actually drawn from a 2009 (Azerbaijan), 2010 (Russian Federation and Tajikistan), or 2011 population census (multiple countries, including Croatia, Czech Republic, and Poland). 44 UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2013 The data collated by UNHCR on the number of persons exclusively under its statelessness mandate fills in only part of the picture of the global stateless population. The following reflects on some of the gaps and challenges. UNHCR can now report data – drawn from government, UN, and other sources – on the number of stateless persons in 75 countries. This is a distinct improvement over the state of statelessness statistics a decade ago, when this data covered only 41 countries. Nevertheless, statelessness remains unmapped in over 50 per cent of States. While the problem may not exist on a significant scale in all of these countries, there is no denying that the data remain incomplete and many cases of statelessness do not appear in the statistics. At a macro level, this problem is mitigated by the extrapolation of an estimate for the actual number of stateless persons globally (i.e. at least 10 million, while just 3.5 million are accounted for in countrylevel data). At a regional and country level, however, greater effort is needed to fill in the gaps in statistical coverage. The goal set by UNHCR as part of its 10 actions in the Campaign to End Statelessness – of achieving quantitative data coverage for 150 states by 2024 – is therefore a welcome one.60 STATISTICS FOR DIFFERENT COUNTRIES ARE COMPILED FROM DIFFERENT DATA SETS USING DIFFERENT METHODOLOGIES Collecting data on statelessness is the primary responsibility of governments, in order to implement their international obligations. But this work may also be carried out by other actors, either in support of this goal or in the execution of their own work. UNHCR collates this data to offer a global snapshot of the available statistics on statelessness. It has already been noted that gathering data on statelessness is a complex task. The fact that it is shared by different actors, in different places, leads to a variety of approaches, and not all of these are able to deliver the same level of reliability or to produce comparable data. Some official statistics produced by governments, for instance, do not disaggregate the data such that stateless persons are identified separately from refugees or from persons of unknown nationality. This could lead to both over- and under-reporting on statelessness. For some countries this number includes persons of ‘undetermined nationality’ (e.g. in Sweden), even though not all such individuals will actually be stateless, 61 while in others it does not (e.g. in the Netherlands). 62 Some figures may include a number of stateless refugees, even though it is UNHCR’s policy to report such persons only in its refugee statistics. 63 This may have taken place because the methodology used to collect the data simply does not account for different types of residence or protection status. Some figures are based on census data, the accuracy and currency of which are affected both by the challenge of relying on self-identification as a means to count stateless persons and by the fact that a census is usually carried out only every 10 years. 64 Data can become outdated between census exercises, thus potentially failing to reflect newly emerging situations of statelessness as well as efforts to reduce the number of cases through conferral of nationality. Some statelessness figures are based on a specific data-collection exercise that targets only part of the country or only a specific stateless population within the country. Examples of this include Myanmar, where only stateless Rohingya who were encountered in a survey conducted in three townships in Rakhine state