Introduction helped to reduce the risk of statelessness faced by children in Africa, Asia, and, in particular, the Middle East in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. New accessions to one or both of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness continue to strengthen support for the international standards designed to protect stateless persons and prevent new cases of statelessness from arising. The ethical, rule of law, development, and peacebuilding imperatives that compel the international community to end the plight of stateless people around the world are also clear. The suffering caused by statelessness was amply illustrated once more in UNHCR’s 2015 report ‘I am Here, I Belong: The Urgent Need to End Childhood Statelessness’. That report, based on first-hand interviews with over 250 people in seven countries, confirmed that statelessness unfairly deprives children of the essential conditions for a normal childhood, such as the ability to go to school or to see a doctor. The rule of law dimension of statelessness, highlighted so clearly in the UN Secretary General’s 2011 ‘Guidance Note on Statelessness’, has been further affirmed through the willingness of States to take this up as an important legal issue during UN Member States’ appearances before the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism of the Human Rights Council, as well as through recent attention to matters of nationality by UN treaty bodies. The international community’s resolve to “leave no one behind” with respect to sustainable development reflects a broadly shared recognition that in addition to the ethical and rule of law dimensions, there are clear economic and social development reasons that weigh in favour of all people’s right to nationality. In the coming years we can expect to see enhanced activity in the field of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, and to see this activity make innovative use of new technologies, such as digital ID. The World Bank’s new ID4D (Identity for Development) initiative, for example, aspires to support States to achieve universal identification. While identification and nationality are not the same thing, this new interest in registration and identification as development issues presents opportunities for stateless people. A few years ago there were no civil society networks or nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) focused exclusively on statelessness. Now there are dedicated civil society networks in 8