Global Action Plan to End Statelessness

The Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014–2024 was launched by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in November 2014 as the operational framework for its #IBelong Campaign. It set out ten concrete Actions for states, UNHCR, and partners to pursue, with the explicit goal of ending statelessness within a decade.

The ten Actions include:

• Resolving existing major situations of statelessness
• Ensuring no child is born stateless
• Removing gender discrimination from nationality laws
• Preventing denial, loss, or deprivation of nationality on discriminatory grounds
• Preventing statelessness in cases of state succession
• Granting protection status to stateless migrants and facilitating their naturalisation
• Ensuring birth registration for the prevention of statelessness
• Issuing nationality documentation to those entitled to it
• Acceding to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness
• Improving quantitative and qualitative data on stateless populations

The Plan was designed in consultation with states, civil society, and stateless people themselves, and progress was tracked through UNHCR reporting and periodic High-Level Segments, including the October 2019 High-Level Segment on Statelessness in Geneva, which generated hundreds of state and stakeholder pledges.

While the Plan catalysed reforms — such as Kyrgyzstan being declared in 2019 the first country to resolve all known cases of statelessness on its territory, and Madagascar and Sierra Leone reforming gender-discriminatory nationality laws — the 2024 target was not met. UNHCR estimates several million people remain stateless globally, with large populations including the Rohingya from Myanmar and groups in Côte d'Ivoire, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic. In late 2024, UNHCR launched a successor Global Alliance to End Statelessness to carry the agenda forward as a multi-stakeholder platform.