reported was understood to be a dwindling group of elderly stateless persons who came to Egypt from Armenia or nearby countries in the early 20th century and who never gained nationality.13 Other sources point to several other populations that are stateless or at risk of statelessness in Egypt and are not included in this global data, including Palestinians14 and members of the Azazma tribe,15 as well as potentially some children of migrants and refugees who can face barriers accessing birth registration.16 The fourth and final country that is a new entry this year is the United States of America. Previously absent from the global statelessness reporting overview, the USA is now marked with an asterisk in recognition of the presence of a stateless population. An annotation explains that the number of people affected is unknown because there is no status determination procedure to identify stateless persons in the USA, nor is there official government data-tracking on statelessness. In 2018, a national grassroots organization – United Stateless – was established by stateless people with the aim of raising awareness of the existence of statelessness in the country and advocating for the rights of these stateless persons. The acknowledgement in UNHCR’s global statistical reporting that there is a stateless population in the USA is an important step in this regard. UNHCR, United Stateless and the Center for Migration Studies have embarked on a study to map statelessness in the USA but the findings have yet to be published. Are the numbers going up, or down? In this year’s Global Trends report, UNHCR provides an update on efforts to resolve statelessness, noting that “in 2018, progress continued to be made to reduce the number of stateless people through acquisition and confirmation of nationality”, with “a reported 56,400 people from 24 countries” acquiring nationality during the year. This number is very similar to progress reported in previous years, with 60,800 and 56,500 people reported to have acquired nationality in 2016 and 2017 respectively. Sweden, the Russian Federation and Tajikistan were once again amongst the countries named as achieving “significant reductions”. Nevertheless, with UNHCR estimating that in the five largest non-refugee statelessness situations alone, 70,000 children are born into statelessness each year, this rate of reduction means that for the third year running, the number of new cases of children born stateless was higher than the number of existing cases of statelessness that were reported as resolved. This doesn’t take into account likely increases of stateless populations that are not counted in the UNHCR statistics. This is also before considering the question of how many people were rendered newly stateless during the year through denial or deprivation of nationality – a phenomenon that is known to be on the rise globally. Even as a factor of the number of stateless persons captured in global statistics (3.9 million), a reduction of 56,400 cases equates to less than 1.5% of the total recorded stateless population worldwide. This demonstrates that for meaningful reduction to be achieved, it is critical to break the cycle of inherited statelessness. States should be held to their obligations under international law (including the CRC) and structural change pursued. This is not to say that at a country or even regional level a greater degree of progress is not being achieved. The number of individuals still left without a nationality as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s continues to decline. The table below shows how the picture has evolved in all 15 successor states over the past five years, with the overall numbers reduced by over 100,000 (or 16%) as compared to 2014.17 13 UNHCR, The situation of stateless persons in the Middle East and North Africa, 2010, available at: https://www.unhcr.org/protection/statelessness/4ce63e079/situation-stateless-persons-middle-east-north-africa-laura-van-waas.html. 14 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless, 2014, available at http://www.institutesi.org/worldsstateless.pdf 15 Ahmed Awadalla (Global Voices), 'The Stateless People of Egypt' (16 October 2012), available at: https://globalvoices.org/2012/10/16/egypt-thestateless-people-of-egypt/ 16 Bronwen Manby, ‘Preventing Statelessness among Migrants and Refugees: Birth Registration and Consular Assistance in Egypt and Morocco’, June 2019, LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series (27), available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/101091/1/Manby_preventing_statelessness_among_migrants.pdf. 17 Not long after publishing this year’s Global Trends report, in early July 2019, UNHCR announced that Kyrgyzstan had made history as the first country to end statelessness since the #iBelong campaign was launched, “by bringing the number of stateless people in the country from over 5