Interview with Volker Türk, Assistant High Commissioner - Protection As the AHC/P and in previous roles in UNHCR you have acted as a champion of the Organization’s work on statelessness. Can you share your perspective on how the statelessness work has evolved over the years? My first posting with UNHCR was in Kuwait from 1991 to 1993. Statelessness was of course a big issue there. Having written a PHD about UNHCR and its mandate, I had a strong feeling about UNHCR’s responsibility towards stateless people and the role we had to play in fighting for the rights of the Bidoon, including their access to education. It was a very enlightening experience for me. I then went to Headquarters in the mid-1990s as a Legal Officer for Central and Eastern Europe exactly when the breakup of the Soviet Union led to massive statelessness issues in the region, and UNHCR’s work on the issue really started to increase. At the time the understanding within UNHCR of the issue and its potential linkages to displacement was not very pronounced yet. But by the time I became the Director of the Division of International Protection we had some momentum and even strong encouragement from the General Assembly to do more. Volker Türk, Assistant High Commissioner – Protection © UNHCR very complex situation in Myanmar. I think that we’ve gone from a situation where statelessness was not yet fully embraced by the organization to reaching a state where it has really become part of our DNA. The transformation is visible also in the number of accessions to the statelessness conventions. For example, the number of accessions to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, has taken it from being moribund to having very meaningful adherence; there were fewer than 20 Parties for decades after its initial adoption and almost four times that number today. And there will be more accessions to come. I was so happy when in 2014 we were able to launch the #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024. We realized of course that it was highly ambitious, but we thought, “Why should the world not be ambitious about resolving an issue that is entirely man-made?” In that time, we expanded the Statelessness Section, upgrading it from a Unit, and created new regional statelessness positions around the world, helping to make the work much more operational. There’s no doubt the Campaign has helped enormously in raising awareness. Our expertise is widely recognized now, including in the 3