UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Cate Blanchett and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi wrote an op-ed on Le Monde to urge the world to #EndStatelessness. UNHCR launched Global Alliance to End Statelessness, a new alliance to end statelessness.

Cate is a guest speaker at ÖGNI Sustainability Symposium on Thursday, held in Vienna, Austria.

UNHCR

The international legal definition of a stateless person is “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”. In simple terms, this means that a stateless person does not have the nationality of any country. Some people are born stateless, but others become stateless.

Stateless people are found in all regions of the world. The majority of stateless people were born in the countries in which they have lived their entire lives.

A new Global Alliance to End Statelessness was launched in Geneva on Monday with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi urging States, UN agencies, civil society, stateless-led organizations, academia, the private sector and others to, “Join the alliance, join this historic effort.”

The Global Alliance was launched on the first day of the annual Executive Committee meeting of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in Geneva. It will build on the successes of the decade-long #IBelong campaign, which has made important progress towards ending statelessness since 2014, including more than a half a million people worldwide acquiring citizenship.

While the #IBelong campaign was a UNHCR-led effort to raise awareness and catalyze action, the Global Alliance represents a concerted shift toward multistakeholder collaboration. UNHCR will play a key role and host the Global Alliance’s Secretariat, and efforts will be led by a 15-member Advisory Committee. This new initiative seeks to accelerate action on pledges to resolve statelessness, including those made during the two Global Refugee Fora.

“It is my great honour to officially launch the Global Alliance to End Statelessness. This is an effort to bring together a broader coalition of governments, civil society, international organizations, academia and those that have been affected by statelessness,” Grandi said. “It will be a place to exchange best practices, to try to identify and develop solutions and to advocate collectively for this cause.”

UN: Half a million stateless people got citizenship in past decade

The UN said Friday (11 October, 2024) that in the decade since it launched a campaign to end the limbo of statelessness, over half a million people without a nationality had acquired citizenship.

In a report, the United Nations’ refugee agency detailed the progress made since it launched its #IBelong campaign in 2014. Its aim was to mobilise international action to resolve the problem of statelessness.

The UNHCR described statelessness as “a major human rights violation”.

It leaves people politically and economically marginalised, unable to access critical services and particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, the agency argued.

Last year, the UNHCR reported that there were 4.4 million stateless people recorded, but that millions more were affected since the data only covers around half of the world’s countries.

The campaign, which ends this year, aimed to address “a largely invisible crisis: that of millions of people around the world living in the shadows, without a nationality, unable to assert their most basic human rights”, said UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi.

Australian actor Cate Blanchett, UNHCR’s goodwill ambassador, said the progress had been “remarkable”.

“Twenty countries have improved rights for stateless people, (and) 13 countries have passed laws to ensure that no child is born stateless,” she said. “We must make sure that anyone still living without nationality is given the right to be recognised and included.” 

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High Commissioner @FilippoGrandi and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Cate Blanchett urge the world to act now to #EndStatelessness.

Millions live without nationality, facing abuse, detention and expulsion. It’s time for change.

??Read their joint op-ed.https://t.co/e083wNSxoJ pic.twitter.com/9hUEih23mf

— UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (@Refugees) October 16, 2024

ÖGNI Sustainability Symposium

“When we think about sustainability, we think of renewable energy, electric cars or green technologies – but we often overlook the enormous impact that buildings have on our carbon footprint,” explains Cate Blanchett about the role of the real estate industry in a sustainable future, “the physical environment – our homes, workplaces, places of leisure – is an enormous part of what we leave to future generations.”

Sources: UNHCR – #IBelong, UNHCR -New Global Alliance, Heute