© UNHCR/Mark Henley Civil Society Event UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi presents the 2019 Nansen Refugee Award to human rights lawyer, Azizbek Ashurov. Through his organisation Ferghana Valley Lawyers Without Borders, he has helped well over 10,000 people to gain Kyrgyz nationality after they became stateless following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Civil Society Event Civil society actors have played an important role in achieving the goals of the #IBelong Campaign. In the last five years, a number of regional networks made up of civil society organizations focused on statelessness have been established, namely the Americas Network on Nationality and Statelessness (Red ANA), the European Network on Statelessness, the Central Asian Network on Statelessness, the Southern African Nationality Network and the Statelessness Network Asia Pacific. These regional networks partnered with UNHCR to organize an event, moderated by the European Network on Statelessness, to call attention to the challenges that remain and the efforts of a wide range of actors and activists from around the world to tackle these. The High Commissioner opened the event by stressing the essential nature of the partnership between UNHCR and civil society in affecting change and protecting the right to a nationality; he encouraged those present to keep pressing for UNHCR and others to do more to end statelessness. U N H C R > H I G H - L E V E L S E G M E N T O N S T A T E L E S S N E S S : R E S U LT S A N D H I G H L I G H T S 15