Apatride Network is a coalition of stateless individuals and stateless-led organisations in the European Union, addressing the human rights issue of statelessness regionally and globally. Statelessness is when a person does not have any nationality or citizenship, lacking legal belonging to any country. Due to how the exercise of rights are conditional on that belonging, a person without it lacks access to human rights. The topic intersects with the most prominent challenges of today: it is simultaneously a problem in human rights, minority rights, child protection, development, justice and democracy, forced displacement, torture and inhumane treatment, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. It disproportionately affects the marginalised and vulnerable populations. According to UNHCR data, 45% of all stateless people are estimated to be children.

In the long-term, statelessness undermines democracy and the rule of law, fragments society, violates civil liberties, creates a barrier to access justice, and puts to question the nation-state model of governance. It entails disentrancement from the right to have rights, with people being denied basic rights and forsaken in a vicious cycle of vulnerability and unequal treatment. True numbers on how many people are stateless is unknown. However, according to the World Bank, at least one billion people lack any legal identification, being de facto stateless.

Our pillars of work are a response to the key problems in the field of statelessness: low awareness, poor connectivity between the affected and civil society, and insufficient cooperation between relevant stakeholders. To the end of resolving these problems, Apatride Network work focuses on the following:

🔸Awareness-raising and advocacy

🔸Impact initiatives that pinpoint and resolve barriers of arbitrary exclusion of the stateless and other vulnerable populations

🔸Outreach and community building

🔸Connecting stateless people to legal aid, supervising and monitoring these cases, while training legal professionals to improve their capacity and knowledge on statelessness

🔸Serving as ‘bridge builders’ between relevant actors such as academics, NGOs, UN agencies, state-actors, the media, legal professionals, and financial institutions

🔸Leveraging innovation and new technology, such as with blockchain, to advance and secure basic rights of stateless people

Key achievements in year 2024:

✅ Hosted the first edition of Statelessness Awareness Forum (Europe), history's first stateless-led international forum focused on systemically raising awareness on statelessness. The forum brought together participants and leading experts on statelessness, including six experts with direct experience of statelessness, for five days of enhanced engagement on the overlooked human rights issue.

✅ Successfully piloted the initial stage of the Global Statelessness Fund (GSF), a first of its kind fund that addresses systemic underfunding of grassroots initiatives that tackle statelessness. Our piloting paved the way for 50+ stateless-led organizations and campaigners to be provided much-needed resourcing, supporting efforts that can make life more livable for fellow stateless people.

✅ After years of lobbying, made a breakthrough in having UNHCR clear up barriers to stateless people applying for UNHCR jobs. We are currently working hard to have other UN agencies adapt a similar fix in their careers and HR systems. Stay tuned!

✅ Expanded legal assistance work, helping connect stateless people to legal aid; had success in EU courts by equipping our NGO partners with relevant legal details and arguments in some cases; and further built-up our ongoing projects with international law firms thanks to PILnet.

✅ Joined Global Alliance to End Statelessness as well as European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), working toward the goal of enhancing regional and global collaboration in statelessness awareness raising, advocacy, publications, capacity building, and other such relevant work.

✅ Provided 20+ statelessness guest lectures (and counting) in different universities and organisations, while also being involved in international conferences in Malaysia, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany.

✅ Together with our partners, launched the Blockchain for Human Rights consortium, working to advocate for responsible use of blockchain solutions in digitization of identification. In the long-term, decentralization of identification is of strong interest to us for its potential in safeguarding individual and collective identity.

Apatride Network continues to be under-resourced and understaffed. A lot has to do with the challenges of being a stateless-led network in a difficult environment with poor visibility. Prioritizing impact and other initiatives, we have had little capacity to do fundraising. We stretch each limited resource to its maximum utility. What we have lacked in resources, we have made up in passion, creativity, work ethic, and reliability. However, long-term and with quickly expanding projects, this is very challenging to sustain. We hope to build up our projects and have more stability in capacity, to further positive change on the lives of fellow stateless people. Giveth donations can fill these gaps, helping focus our work on the truly meaningful and life changing.