The Global Alliance to End Statelessness: SALAM DHR’s membership will help shape future measures in global struggle to end statelessness

Jawad Fairooz, Director of the United Kingdom and Lebanon-based human rights NGO, Salam for Democracy and Human Rights (SALAM DHR), has proudly joined 14 other leaders and representatives in the Global Alliance Taskforce, the body coordinating the The Global Alliance to End Statelessness.

The Global Alliance to End Statelessness (The Global Alliance) represents the next step in the global response to statelessness, including deprivation of citizenship.

The new initiative, created and coordinated by the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is the global platform that, “by 2030 seeks to accelerate solutions to statelessness through a collective multistakeholder approach, which centres and respects the experience of those who are stateless and formerly stateless.”

The Statelessness Section in the International Protection Division of UNHCR selected the 15 members of the Global Alliance Taskforce. “The Global Alliance Taskforce is composed of stateless and formerly stateless people, civil society organisations, academic institutions, faith-based organisations, UN and other international entities [and] has been established to jointly develop the foundational elements of the Global Alliance.” It convened its first meeting on 1 September 2022.

The Global Alliance will be formally launched in 2023 and “it will seek to build on the concrete gains and momentum generated by UNHCR’s #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024 and serve as a platform to increase collective advocacy efforts, catalyse political commitments to address the problem, and accelerate the implementation of concrete solutions to statelessness.”

The Global Alliance gives shape to the recommendation to “end statelessness” found in the UN Secretary General’s ‘Our Common Agenda’ report.

Since 2012, SALAM DHR has taken part in and led campaigns to end the arbitrary deprivation of citizenship, notably in Bahrain and other countries in the Gulf, as well as to end the statelessness faced by hundreds of thousands of Bidoon, mainly in Kuwait but across the Gulf. On 31 October 2016, SALAM DHR, Amnesty International and other organisations co-hosted the globally-focused seminar Arbitrary deprivation of citizenship, which resulted in the first comprehensive report on the issue addressing the Gulf. Its Ana Bahraini and Ana Kuwaiti (I am Bahraini and I am Kuwaiti) initiatives are intended to provide real-time analysis of the practice in the Gulf. Jawad Fairooz’s membership in the Global Alliance Taskforce will enable SALAM DHR to advance these and other efforts.

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