304 D. Owen child stateless, without proof of birth or identity of parents, the child has a significantly higher risk of being stateless.13 In the European Union, administrative statelessness is a particular problem for the Roma, notably in the post-Yugoslavia states.14 Relevant forms of what I am calling ‘administrative statelessness’ may arise from the lack of state administrative capacity (especially in rural areas), administrative or procedural problems (such as excessive fees, unrealistic deadlines, lack of appeal or review procedures, etc.), administrative corruption (e.g., the need for bribes to get documents processed), or as a product of refugee flight or irregular migration. One reason for distinguishing structural and administrative sources of de jure statelessness is that they draw our attention to different dimensions of what constructing the right to have the right to a nationality requires ranging from issues of capacity, disposition and norms in the administrative practice of the state to governmental conceptions of national political community to the normative ordering of global political society. It is against this background that we can briefly consider the #IBelong campaign launched by the UNHRC in 2014 to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1954 Convention with the ambitious aim of ending de jure statelessness within 10 years. While it is, unsurprisingly, unclear how many people are de jure stateless (both for reasons pertaining to who gets counted within the definition and for reasons pertaining the problems of counting), estimates that are acknowledged likely to be conservative place the figure in the region of 10–15 million (of which 3 million are estimated to be children).15 An early positive sign for this campaign came in West Africa in 2015 as the fifteen ECOWAS Member States adopted the landmark Abidjan Declaration in February 2015, recognizing statelessness as a scourge in the region and committing to end this phenomenon by 2024, with the 2017 Plan of Action laying out concrete measures aimed at addressing the causes of statelessness by rectifying gaps in nationality laws and issues relating to proof of nationality.16 If successful, this would not be not a trivial result but one that combines a focus on technical issues relating to legal rules and administrative capacity with supporting a more inclusive approach to political community at least within the region. However, while the energy and attention directed by this campaign towards statelessness is welcome and can be seen as supporting the more robust construction of a right to nationality, we should be wary of imagining that the problem of de jure statelessness can be easily addressed in a global political context in which non-compliance with the international norm against de jure statelessness may serve government’s political purposes. This point will be to the forefront in the next section addressing citizenship deprivation, but it also has salience here in terms of the political will to acknowledge or redress the problem of statelessness. 13 Howard (2017), p. 284. See Sardelic (2015) and Bianchini (2018), pp. 59–61. 15 ISI (2014). 16 ECOWAS (2017). 14 123