Lawyers for Human Rights Lawyers for Human Rights is a national non-profit organisation with its head office in Pretoria, South Africa. LHR’s principle aims and objectives are to promote, uphold, foster, strengthen and enforce all human rights in South Africa. One of LHR’s specialised human rights programmes is the Refugee and Migrants Rights Programme which operates out of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Musina and Durban. Through this programme, LHR provides direct legal assistance and also supports and engages in litigation on behalf of refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants. In 2011, LHR launched the Statelessness Project as part of the Refugee and Migrants Rights Programme with support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The Statelessness Project has been operating out of Musina which is near the Zimbabwean border and in Pretoria. Community outreach has been conducted in and around Johannesburg and in the farming regions of the Western Cape. Client referrals have also been fielded from LHR and partner organisations in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Through a series of resolutions beginning in 1994, the United Nations General Assembly gave the UNHCR the mandate to work with governments to prevent statelessness from occurring, to resolve cases that do occur and to protect the rights of stateless people around the world. Since March 2011, UNHCR has been funding LHR’s statelessness work. Acknowledgments This report was written by LHR’s Jessica P. George and Rosalind Elphick with important inputs from Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh and Jacob van Garderen. LHR extends its sincere gratitude to the UNHCR for its long-standing support of LHR’s work in the asylum sector and for supporting LHR’s work on the prevention and reduction of statelessness. Photography in this report was taken and edited by Daniel Boshoff, a freelance photographer based in Cape Town.

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