WUNRN
Please see both parts of this WUNRN
release on Statelessness.
26 September 2007
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UNHCR News Stories |
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An ethnic Tamil tea
picker in the highlands of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka granted citizenship to more
than 190,000 descendants of tea plantation workers. © UNHCR/G.Amarasinghe |
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Good News
for Groups of Stateless People After Years of Stagnation GENEVA, September 25 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency on Tuesday
welcomed a succession of positive developments in recent months concerning
several groups of stateless people across the world, following many years of
stagnation. Stateless people are those who for a variety of reasons do not
have nationality or citizenship in the state where they are living – or
anywhere else – with sometimes devastating consequences. "There have now been major breakthroughs in three Asian
countries – namely Sri Lanka, Nepal and most recently Bangladesh – which, all
told, should benefit some 3 million formerly stateless people. There are also
significant legal developments currently under way in Brazil," UNHCR
spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis told journalists in Geneva. She said that UNHCR, which has a mandate for stateless people as
well as for refugees, "warmly welcomes" the recent decision by
Bangladesh to confirm citizenship for at least 160,000 of the country's
300,000 Urdu-speaking population, also known as Biharis. An inter-ministerial meeting made its ruling on citizenship
earlier this month, and its decision has been referred to the law ministry for
final approval. The Biharis became stateless as a by-product of the
separation of Pakistan from India in 1947 and the subsequent civil war that
led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Earlier this year, Nepal conducted an extraordinary operation
which resulted in some 2.6 million people receiving certificates of
citizenship. Hundreds of mobile teams fanned out across Nepal's 75 districts,
visiting even the remotest of mountain villages, to ensure that certificates
were issued to as many of the country's inhabitants as possible. This followed an earlier campaign in Sri Lanka, where more than
190,000 people obtained Sri Lankan citizenship over a 10-day period, after a
change in the law that benefitted the stateless descendants of tea pickers
who had been brought to the island state from British India nearly two
centuries earlier. And there has also been movement on this issue in South America
and Europe. Last Thursday, Brazil's Congress passed an important
constitutional amendment granting nationality to children born to a Brazilian
parent living abroad. Previously such children risked ending up stateless,
and it is estimated that up to 200,000 children could benefit from this
development. And in a further step, later Tuesday the Brazilian Congress was
scheduled to debate acceding to the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of
Stateless. Globally, however, relatively small numbers of states have
ratified the two statelessness conventions – just 33 in the case of the 1961
Convention (including Rwanda which signed up to both at the end of 2006) and
62 in the case of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless
Persons. This compares to the 147 states that have now signed up to the 1951
Refugee Convention and/or its 1967 Protocol. "Despite the recent advances, millions of other people
remain without an official identity, living in the Kafkaesque world of the
stateless. In many cases they are unable to educate their children, benefit
from government health care, get a legal job, travel abroad – or do any of a
wide range of things which most of us take for granted," Pagonis said. "UNHCR believes that, in all, there may be as many as 15
million stateless people worldwide in at least 49 countries – a larger
population than that of many established individual states," she added. |
26 September 2007
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More than 200,000
ethnic Tamils were able to obtain Sri Lankan citizenship thanks to a
progressive law and a citizenship campaign co-organised by UNHCR. © UNHCR/C.P.Wijetunga |
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