In order for UNHCR to carry through with its statelessness mandate, it has been assigned with the mission of protecting and assisting stateless populations, providing advanced legal and humanitarian aid especially in cases where the States concerned fail to do so. Through a series of Conclusions, the UNGA reiterates the UNHCR’s mandate to identify, prevent and reduce statelessness around the world and calls on the agency to work closely with Governments in order to provide technical support and to encourage States to accede to the Statelessness Conventions.
UNHCR is also sharing important data, shedding light on statelessness as a whole. Positively, the agency is doing significant work on gathering statistics and reporting on the numbers
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In Myanmar, there is a total of 810,000 reported stateless persons, mostly belonging to the Rohingya religious and ethnic minority group. Minority communities are also affected in Thailand, which ranks second on the list with 506,197 reported stateless people. In Africa, Cote d’Ivoire alone is home to 700,000 stateless persons chiefly due to restrictive citizenship laws which exclude a great part of the population from nationality rights. Looking at Europe, the problem mostly affects the Baltic countries, which gained their independence after the dissolution of the USSR. As a result of State succession, Latvia and Estonia hold a number of 262,802 and 88,076 stateless people respectively. Similarly, other former soviet republics have thousands of stateless persons in their territories. Lastly, in the Middle East and North Africa, Syrian Arab Republic (160,000) and Kuwait (93,000) are among the states with relatively high numbers of stateless populations. This is the result either of the arbitrary deprivation of nationality from minority groups by a State’s act, as is the case in Syria, or discriminatory nationality laws which do not allow women to pass on their nationality to their