nothing
featured
being stateless
24 year old Ganga Neupane is
stateless
Like
several million persons worldwide Ganga Neupane has no
citizenship. Being stateless often means not having regular
citizenship rights, like the rights to paid employment, receiving
healthcare, attending public and privat schools and owning
property. Furthermore a stateless person will not have a regular
passport making traveling difficult, if not impossible.
Ganga Neupane is one of nearly 100,000 Bhutanese refugees
living in camps in southeast Nepal. She became stateless 13
year old, as she together with tens of thousands of the mainly
Nepali-speaking Hindu people in southern Bhutan - who had
no proof of identity - were forced to flee Bhutan. The Bhutanese
refugee situation has become one of the most protracted and
neglected refugee crises in the world.
"Once
you have fallen into being a stateless person you can see
no way out."
Read more about Ganga Neupane in iVilliage.co.uk
Stateless persons are found
all over the world. Israel regarded those Palestinians
who remained within its 1948 borders as residents but not
citizens. Only in the early 1980s did they all gain citizenship.
When Jordan annexed the WestBank in the early 1950s it adopted
similar policies. As a result, the remainder of the Palestinian
population of former Palestine were doomed to live
as stateless refugee holders of Travel Documents issued by
the Arab host countries: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt
and Iraq. This is the situation of those resident in
the West Bank and Gaza. Today more than half of the estimated
total population of eight million Palestinians are refugees
and stateless. Furheremore the Palestinians are excluded from
the international protection regime for refugees and stateless
persons because their displacement predates the creation of
UNHCR. In Latvia stateless persons are referred to
as "aliens" by the authorities. The country's 340,000
Russian non-citizens -- along with over 100,000 Belarussians
and Ukrainians -- cannot vote in elections, become civil servants,
lawyers or army officers or hold a full Latvian passport.
In some cases also the children of a stateless person will
be denied birth certicicates, citizenship and therefore also
school and medical care. According to Human
Rights Watch this is the case for the children of longtime
Bidun residents of Kuwait and for Rohingian refugees
in Malaysia.
---
links:
| Interview
with Ganga Neupane (iVilliage.co.uk) | ~ | Bhutanese
Refugees Rendered Stateless (Amnesty Internatinal) | ~
| On
the Palestinian situation (Abbas Shiblak) | ~ | Refugee,
Immigrant, and Stateless Children (Human Rights Watch)
| ~ | "Stateless
Nation" at the Venice Biennale (New York Times) |
~ | The
1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons
|
---
former featured nothings
:
THE POTENT
NOTHING OF CYBERSPACE - this virtual reality in which we now
are taking part ...
THE
ACTIVE NOTHING OF TERROR AND RESPONS - the World Trade Center
- Afghanistan and on ...
NOTHING
AT ROOSEUM, Malmö's Center for Contemporary Art, 3 November
- 16 December, 2001. works by 35 artists exploring notions
of invisibility, imagination and dematerialisation ...
FOR
EVERY TENT; THE OTHER!
- consisting of two Irish green, empty tents, one raised outside
Atelier 35 in Bucharest, and one inside the gallery space
...
THE
HYPER-METAPHOR; UK, RAISING TENTS
- containing, among other things, a motorway, ten tents, a
text discussion and an internet diary ...
---
-
suggestions is gratefully accepted!
|