Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

London, July 5: Kyrgyzstan has on Thursday handed citizenship to the stateless people on its soil, in what the United Nations (UN) officials applauded as a breakthrough in the international fight to put an end to the plight of tens of thousands of “legal ghosts” who does not own their nationality.

According to Dawn news reports, an estimated 10-15 million people worldwide have not yet recognized as nationals by any nation, suffering a damaging lack of education, jobs, and housing, and at detention and exploitation risks.

The United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees (UNHCR), the refugee agency, launched a campaign named “Ibelong” in 2014 to put an end to statelessness in few years. Kyrgyzstan becomes the first nation to comply with the deadline.

More than a million people faced a crackdown after the breakdown in 1990s of the Soviet Union, during they failed to acquire nationality from any of the successor states.

UNHCR head Filippo Grandi hailed Kyrgyzstan, former Soviet republic, for cutting short its statelessness population to zero from about 13,700 in just five years.

In an official statement, he said, “Kyrgyzstan’s leadership on resolving known cases of statelessness is a remarkable example that I hope others will applaud and heed.”

“This is a terrific milestone,” UNHCR’s statelessness section head Melanie Khanna said.

“Central Asia is often an overlooked region, and yet several countries there have been making steady progress towards identifying stateless people and providing them with citizenship,” she added.

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