Stateless Persons are included. Excluded from this process, then, are an estimated 500,000 additional stateless Rohingya found elsewhere in the country, 65 as well as any of the other populations affected by statelessness in Myanmar. 66 This limitation is acknowledged in a footnote in UNHCR’s statelessness statistical table, which points out that the number refers to ‘Muslim residents of northern Rakhine State’. Another example is the Dominican Republic. Here, the number of 210,000 stateless persons accounts for only the first generation of persons of Haitian descent born on Dominican soil who have been left stateless following a Constitutional Court ruling stripping them of nationality. There is no data available on the second and third generations, which have been simultaneously affected and yet are not included in the current statistics. 67 The methodological difficulties of compiling statelessness data across different countries have led to several situations where the number of stateless persons reported substantially under-represents the true scale of the problem. It is valuable to continue to include such data in UNHCR’s overviews of country statistics, even when it only tells a part of the statistical story. It is also helpful that, in many cases, these partial data are noted through the inclusion of a footnote (as for Myanmar). Yet it would be beneficial if such countries were identified consistently, i.e. in all cases, through an explanatory footnote that clearly indicates that only partial data are available. COUNTRIES WITH KNOWN STATELESSNESS PROBLEMS, BUT NO RELIABLE FIGURE, ARE INDICATED WITH AN ASTERISK IN UNHCR’S STATISTICAL COMPILATIONS Wherever UNHCR has ‘information about stateless persons but no reliable data’, these countries are marked with an asterisk (*) in Annex Table 7, which identifies persons under UNHCR’s statelessness 65 mandate. UNHCR has taken this approach since it first started to report country-bycountry data on statelessness, and there certainly is an attraction to it. Usefully, it allows the agency to flag problems of statelessness and identify countries where the response to statelessness perhaps needs to be stepped up, while avoiding the publication of unreliable or unverified data that could give a false impression of the situation. UNHCR presents its statelessness data in the form of a table, without room for more than a footnote’s explanation per country. This means that there is no space to discuss the likely range of the stateless population or to comment on whatever estimates may be available for the number affected. So, even if there are some data on the potential magnitude of statelessness within one of the ‘asterisk countries’, these are – understandably – not included alongside the rest of the global statistics, to avoid misrepresenting the scale of the issue. The asterisk disappears, however, when the data are transposed from UNHCR’s statelessness-specific table to Annex Table 1, in which UNHCR compiles all of the figures for its populations of concern. In the latter table, the asterisks are replaced by dashes (-), indicating that ‘the value is zero, not available, or not applicable.’ The countries believed to be home to a significant stateless population, then, do not stand out from those states for which no data for or problem of statelessness has been flagged at all. This arrangement should change, to ensure that countries with significant stateless populations are also indicated in the main overview. What is also of interest with respect to the ‘asterisk countries’ is just how long a state can remain in this category. Of the 19 countries currently marked with an asterisk in the Yearbook, five were already flagged in this manner in 2004 and 10 in 2005. This shows that the lack of reliable data on statelessness can, itself, be a protracted and at times political issue. This confirms both the importance of identifying such situations and the fact that it does not make sense to wait to act decisively on statelessness until the problem has been comprehensively mapped. Rather, initiatives to protect stateless persons, and to prevent and reduce statelessness, should continue and be further strengthened while also paying due attention to opportunities to better identify and quantify statelessness. Looking beyond UNHCR’s reporting on statelessness to alternative data sources, it is possible to make at least a small start on filling in some of the gaps in countries that currently have asterisks as placeholders, even if this only means identifying a range of estimates for a given country. For instance, it is evident that statelessness affects tens of thousands of people at least in countries such as Lebanon and Zimbabwe. Estimates for the total stateless population in the former range from 80,000 to 200,000;68 in the latter, from 80,000 to 600,000. 69 While a precise quantification of the problem is not possible on the basis of such widely ranging estimates, this information does show that, collectively, the asterisks in UNHCR’s table represent a massive number of stateless persons who are not presently accounted for in global statistics. Looking at these numbers helps to explain why UNHCR has estimated that, despite only accounting for some 3.5 million persons under its statelessness mandate, the total number of stateless persons globally is actually over 10 million. ONLY PERSONS EXCLUSIVELY UNDER UNHCR’S STATELESSNESS PROTECTION MANDATE ARE REPORTED IN ITS STATELESSNESS STATISTICS UNHCR has put a separate programming and budget structure in place to operationalize its distinct statelessness mandate. To ensure that data are made available in a way that effectively informs Fortify Rights, Policies of Persecution. Ending abusive state policies against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, February 2014, available at: http://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Policies_of_ Persecution_Feb_25_Fortify_Rights.pdf. 66 See, for instance, IRIN report ‘The Forgotten Ghurkhas of Burma’, 20 May 2014, available at: http://www.irrawaddy.org/burma/forgotten-gurkhas-burma.html ; Report of the High-Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora , 2001, page 60, available at: http://www.indiandiaspora.nic.in/diasporapdf/chapter20.pdf. 67 See United Nations Population Fund, Primera Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes en la República Dominicana [First National Survey of Immigrants in the Dom. Rep.], available at: http://countryoffice. unfpa.org/dominicanrepublic/2013/05/02/6672/primera_encuesta_nacional_de_inmigrantes_revela_el_volumen_de_la_poblacion_de_origen_extranjero_residente_en_el_pais/. The full report is available at: http://countryoffice.unfpa.org/dominicanrepublic/drive/ResumenENI-2012II.pdf. 68 Frontiers Ruwad, Invisible Citizens: Humiliation and a Life in the Shadows. A Legal and Policy Study on Statelessness in Lebanon, 2011. 69 Refugees International, Lives on Hold. The Human Cost of Statelessness written by M. Lynch, 2005; K. Ridderbos, ‘Stateless former form workers in Zimbabwe’ in Forced Migration Review, 32, 2008, available at: http://www.fmreview.org/FMRpdfs/FMR32/73.pdf. UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2013 45