3 mn stateless people in South Asia to get citizenship

The UNHCR believes that 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

Three million formerly stateless people across South Asia will receive citizenship rights thanks to decisions taken by the governments of Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said recently. It hailed the development as a victory for the rights of people without a nationality or citizenship of any country.

The government of Bangladesh recently announced its decision to confer citizenship on at least 160,000 of the country’s 300,000 Urdu-speaking population, also known as Biharis, who became stateless as a result of the partition of British India into two nations, India and Pakistan, in 1947. And the subsequent civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. An inter-ministerial meeting made its ruling on citizenship earlier in September. The decision has been referred to the law ministry for final approval.

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 benefited stateless descendants of tea plantation workers who had been brought to the island state from British India nearly two centuries earlier.

The decision is part of a succession of positive developments in recent months concerning several groups of stateless people across the world — following many years of stagnation, the UNHCR, which has a mandate for stateless people as well as for refugees, said in a statement.

Stateless people are people who, for a variety of reasons, do not have nationality or citizenship in the state where they live. The 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.

Despite recent advances, millions of people remain without an official identity, living in the world of the stateless. In many cases they are unable to educate their children, benefit from government healthcare, get a legal job, travel abroad or do any of a wide range of things most citizens take for granted.

Globally, relatively few states have ratified the two UN conventions on statelessness — just 33 in the case of the 1961 convention 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.

Source: www.unhcr.org, September 25, 2007
www.un.org/news, September 25, 2007