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   being stateless

24 year old Ganga Neupane is stateless


Ill. photoLike 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.

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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 |


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former featured nothings :


featureLOST CHAIR - by Heidi Rødstøl.
Installation in living room, paint on carpet, variable dimensions, 2003.
 
feature RAISING OF STREET LAMP FOR PLACING OF TIRE - On November 27, 1996, Andreas Slominski upr ooted a lamppost in order to place an abandoned tire around it. The tire was then later stolen.
 
feature PENTAGON HAS STOPPED ALL REFERENCE TO "NUMBER KILLED" in official releases. The preferred word "casualties" conceals responsibility and makes moral questions into non-issues. Moreover the number of casualties is a non-subject in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
feature BUY NOTHING DAY - exposes the environmental and ethical consequences of consumerism. ...
 
feature CREATION OF ANTIMATTER - CERN have announced that they have passed through nature's looking glass and created atoms made of antimatter, or anti-atoms ...
 
feature REFUGEES ARE NON-PERSONS - taking photographs that could "humanise or personalise" asylum seekers has been banned by former defense minister Peter Reith's office in Australia ...
 
feature WHAT IS - WHAT IS NOT? - a story about an encounter and about trying to differ between fact and non-fact ...
 
feature THE RIGHT NOT TO BE BORN - the French parliament has passed a bill that states that "nobody can claim to have been harmed simply by being born". the extraordinary bill was a response to a conviction by the French supreme court that is said to have established the right not to be born ...
 
feature THE 11,202,803 CHILDREN - who were born out of nothing during the 31 days of Mars 2002 ...
 
feature NOTHING I KNOW / SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW - by Graham Gussin ...
 
feature THE POTENT NOTHING OF CYBERSPACE - this virtual reality in which we now are taking part ...


feature THE ACTIVE NOTHING OF TERROR AND RESPONS - the World Trade Center - Afghanistan and on ...


feature 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 ...



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