Initiatives
Below is a list of our main initiatives along with their brief descriptions. The initiatives are in three different categories: a) ongoing, involving our staple work b) standalone initiatives big enough to have their own dedicated working groups c) brewing initiatives that are still under development.
Ongoing Initiatives
We raise awareness on statelessness by providing lectures to universities, UN agencies, NGOs, state actors, and other relevant parties. We also publish academic and media articles, train legal professionals, participate and organise statelessness conferences.
We connect stateless people, refugees, and other forcibly displaced people to legal assistance in the EU. In turn, we help that legal assistance to better understand the cases, helping gather relevant legal details and documents. If you are a forcibly displaced in the EU, especially if you are stateless, do not hesitate to contact us: contact@apatride.eu
Apatride Network assists banks and other financial actors in the EU to get on the same page in respect to financial inclusion of forcibly displaced people, including the stateless. To that end, we partnered up with several international law firms and UNHCR.
Apatride Network is one of two stateless-led organisations in the world piloting the new Global Statelessness Fund. The groundbreaking fund allows stateless-led organisations all over the world to get access to funding using a fiscal host Open Collective.
We continue to do outreach and community building involving stateless people. One of the biggest challenges in statelessness is that stateless people themselves are often incognisant of their own statelessness. Together with our partners we continually bring stateless people together to learn from each other. We are not alone, neither is our voice.
Standalone Initiatives
SAF(E) is the world’s first stateless-led annual conference meant to continually raise awareness on statelessness. The forum involves leading statelessness NGOs, international organisatons, academics, activists, and people with lived experience of statelessness.
Blockchain for Human Rights is an advocacy network started by Apatride Network, Save My Identity, and CoalitionVE partnership. It advocates for responsible use of blockchain technology in addressing human rights issues, particularly the lack as well as abuse of legal identification.
Brewing Initiatives
Media outreach: there are serious issues in imbalances of power in how the stateless are represented in the media. This is partly tied to how the media, on a rare ocassion when it decides to write on statelessness, selectively reaches out to the stateless. The stateless reaching out to the media should assure of better control over the statelessness content, its framing and accuracy.
Citizenship-by-investment: over a hundred countries have some form of migration-by-investment programs that open pathsways to citizenship. Seventeen countries sell citizenship outright. There needs to be more dialogue with countries that have such programmes on how to better accommodate people that need citizenship the most. This can benefit both the countries as well as the stateless.
Freedom of movement: few countries around the world have clear freedom of movement policies for the stateless. Most countries struggle to recognise that stateless people exist. We plan to advocate for better practices by promoting already good practices established by countries like Georgia.
Belarus exiles: hundreds of thousands of Belorussians now face statelessness due to new policies of the Belorussian government in regards to its exiled citizens. Some are already becoming undocumented and effectively stateless, including children. We plan to continually connect the affected to legal assistance in the EU, allowing these people access to options to their grievous circumstance.
