Many thousands of refugees coming to Europe are without a nationality, and some children born to refugees may be at risk of statelessness. Current asylum law and policy often fails to adequately address this, resulting in poor decision making and a failure to protect fundamental rights.
The Stateless Journeys campaign – led by the European Network on Statelessness – calls for full access to rights and support for stateless refugees, and for this to be better prioritised as part of international protection responses. The campaign shows how statelessness is urgent and relevant to those working on asylum and migration. It provides a common platform across the refugee and migration sector for a targeted call to improve the treatment of stateless people.
The campaign was co-designed by stateless changemakers and aims to inspire collective action at regional and national levels. We want stateless people to be empowered and have opportunities to deliver their own messages on what needs to change, both to decision makers and the wider public.
How the campaign was started
Since its inception, initially as a project, the aim of the #StatelessJourneys initiative has been to generate an evidence base and tools for advocacy, capacity-building, awareness-raising and community engagement, to protect the rights of stateless refugees and prevent new cases of statelessness arising in the migration context in Europe. A further aim has been to foster new work and collaborations on this topic.
In 2017 the European Network on Statelessness (ENS) and the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) together set out to examine the relationship between statelessness and forced migration in Europe. As of June 2020, the initiative is being led by ENS through allocation of funding from its key donors, including the Oak Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, and Comic Relief.
The #StatelessJourneys initiative continues to benefit from the expertise and contributions of ENS members and other expert partners and collaborators delivering research, engagement, capacity-building and other activities.
