Azizbek Ashurov is a human rights lawyer with 20 years expertise in matters of statelessness, asylum, legal identity and migration. He is the Director and founding member of Ferghana Valley Lawyers Without Borders (lawyer’s association) based in Kyrgyzstan and coordinator of the Central Asian Network on Statelessness (CANS). CANS is a collaborative network of 15 NGOs and institutions across the five countries of the Central Asia region, working collectively to promote nationality rights and inclusion, and achieve common goals in preventing and reducing statelessness. Azizbek Ashurov is the winner of the prestigious UNHCR 2019 Nansen Refugee Award for his work to support the efforts of the Kyrgyz Republic in becoming the first country in the world to end all known cases of statelessness and developing citizenship institutes. He, leading the countrywide campaign, has helped over 13,000 people to gain Kyrgyz nationality after they became stateless following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, including more than 2,000 children. In 2019, the Nansen Award, in its 65-year history, was awarded for the first time for a contribution to the solution of statelessness and for the first time for a representative of Central Asia.