Note to Correspondents

Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Opens Photo Exhibition

on World’s Stateless People at United Nations Headquarters

 

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) today opened a photo exhibition entitled “The World’s Stateless” in the Visitors’ Lobby of the United Nations Secretariat in New York.  It will be on display through early October.

Alongside the work of award-winning photographer Greg Constantine and his exhibition “Nowhere People:  The World’s Stateless”, the show also features a photomontage based on an original photograph by Alixandra Fazzina, which includes more than 2,000 images by 116 photographers.  The photomontage was prepared in collaboration with Microsoft and Shoothill for a storytelling website, www.unhcr.org/microsoft.  Ms. Fazzina is the 2010 recipient of the Nansen Refugee Award.

There are up to 12 million stateless persons worldwide, and the images in the exhibition will help bring their stories to light and give a human face to that global issue.  The General Assembly entrusted UNHCR with a mandate relating to the identification, prevention and reduction of statelessness, and the protection of stateless persons.

In commenting on the exhibition, Udo Janz, Director of the UNHCR Office in New York, stated, “The photos in this exhibit remind us of the plight of the world’s stateless, those who have no right to have rights, and highlights the need for States who have not done so to date to accede to the statelessness conventions.”

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (30 August), UNHCR embarked on an awareness-raising campaign about the global impact of statelessness.

For more information on the exhibition, please contact John Solecki, Senior Policy Adviser, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at tel.:  +1 212 963 1764, e-mail:  solecki@unhcr.org.  For more information on United Nations exhibitions, please contact Jan Arnesen at tel.:  +1 212 963 8531, e-mail: arnesen@un.org; or Liza Wichmann at tel.:  +1 212 963 0089, e-mail:  wichmann@un.org; or visit http://visit.un.org.

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For information media • not an official record