Participants at the regional childhood statelessness advocacy workshop for civil societyorganizations that took place in Nairobi, Kenya. © UNHCR
dium risk, or high risk) stands at 1,656,330, or 6.57%
of the entire population.
to citizenship. The case, brought by the organization
Lawyers for Human Rights, is the first of its kind before the Constitutional Court and should help bring
clarity to many children of South Africans who were
born in exile during Apartheid.
On 17 and 18 December 2019, in Nairobi, Kenya, a
regional childhood statelessness advocacy workshop for civil society organizations was organized
under the auspices of the UNHCR-UNICEF Coalition
on Every Child’s Right to a Nationality. A total of 30
members of civil society organizations from Kenya,
Tanzania and Uganda attended the workshop, which
aimed at strengthening the engagement of these
organizations in advocacy campaigns to support law
reform in the three countries. The workshop resulted in ten civil society organizations formalizing their
membership to the UNHCR-UNICEF Coalition, as
well as the development of draft advocacy strategies
which are expected to be finalized soon.
In January and February, the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, visited Burkina-Faso
and Niger and endorsed the UNHCR protection
strategy for the Sahel crisis; the strategy prioritizes
the provision of nationality and identification documents as a means to prevent statelessness and
promotes access to services.
On 7 January, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire adopted its National Action Plan against Statelessness
(NAP), in accordance with its pledges submitted at
the High-Level Segment on Statelessness and its
commitments under the 2015 Abidjan Declaration.
The NAP builds on the conclusions of the statelessness mapping exercise conducted in 2018 and 2019,
according to which the total number of stateless
persons and persons at risk of statelessness in the
country (including those identified as at low risk, me-
In March, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion
and the Open Society Justice Initiative launched a
Year of Action Against Citizenship Stripping in response to the growing number of States resorting to
deprivation of nationality as a counterterrorism and
national security measure. Over the course of the
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