154 Lynch and Reynolds finally within reach. Countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka have made significant strides in responding to situations of statelessness on their territories. The programming and planning efforts of the UN High Commis­ sioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are moving in a positive and expansive direction. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academics, and affected individuals are joining forces in new and creative ways. Media attention has increased. These developments cannot be attributed to a single triggering event and neither took place overnight, nor within a vacuum. They are the result of NGO activism, responsive UN offices, grassroots efforts by the stateless, national leadership, and international support in the form of documentation and advocacy for the promotion and protection of the rights of stateless people. This brief reflective article offers an epigrammatic account of how statelessness has been plucked from the back of the global issues shelf from the perspective of one NGO: Refugees International. Refugees International (RI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy organization, is largely known for aptly spotlighting emerging, unknown or forgotten humanitarian and human rights crises and acting as a catalyst on behalf of the world’s most vulnerable people. The issue of statelessness, which played a role in the early development of the organization in 1979, came to staff attention again in 2003 and was the focus of Fifty Years in Limbo: The Plight of the World’s Stateless People,1 an RI bulletin published later that year. Around the same time, the Equal Justice Initiative of the Open Society Institute, now Open Society Foundations (OSF) was preparing for a 2004 conference on the rights of non-citizens, but only a few other humanitarian and human rights organizations such as the Quaker United Nations Office and Jesuit Refugee Service were engaged in work on behalf of stateless people, ensuring, for example, inclusion in Human Rights Council resolutions or in national-level programs. Meanwhile at UNHCR, a single staff person was dedicated to overseeing the agency’s mandate to work on behalf of stateless people. The world’s stateless populations were rarely, if ever, included in the agency’s planning and programming despite the fact that the results of a member country survey conducted by UNHCR in 2003 indicated over half of the government respondents had encountered problems of statelessness.2 UNHCR’s Executive Committee 1 M Lynch, ‘Fifty Years in Limbo: The Plight of the World’s Stateless People’ (Refugees International Report, 23 October 2003). 2 UNHCR Department of International Protection, ‘Final Report Concerning the Questionnaire on Statelessness Pursuant to the Agenda for Protection: Steps taken by States to Reduce Statelessness and to Meet the Protection Needs of Stateless Persons’ (UNHCR March 2004) <www.unhcr.org/4047002e4.pdf> Accessed 23 October 2013. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 153-162