DUSHANBE, March 31, 2015, Asia-Plus — According to the United Nations estimates, some 42,000 stateless persons live in Tajikistan, Mr. Kevin Allen, UNHCR Representative in Tajikistan, told reporters in Dushanbe on March 31.
“As far as the whole Central Asian region is concerned, the surveys in Kazakhstan identified close to 10,000 persons who were stateless, in Kyrgyzstan – 30,000, in Turkmenistan – 12,000. According to the preliminary data, the number of stateless persons in Tajikistan reached 42,000,” said Mr. Allen. “Some of them still have Soviet passport, some others just have only birth or marriage certificates.”
The 1954 Convention defines a ‘stateless person’ as a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. The definition is recognized as forming part of customary international law.
We will recall that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNHCR in 2007 organized a regional workshop on statelessness in Dushanbe, funded by the European Union and with the participation of government and civil society representatives from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The meeting highlighted efforts governments have made to replace former USSR passports, naturalize large numbers of stateless persons and establish a legal rights framework for permanently resident stateless persons. It was recognized, however, that some people in post-Soviet Central Asia have remained stateless for more than 15 years and that the number of persons officially registered as stateless in most cases does not reflect the real numbers of stateless persons in each country.
In the eight years that have passed since the Dushanbe workshop, progress has been made by some Central Asian governments to address statelessness through: the systematic identification of stateless persons and persons at risk of statelessness; legal reform to reduce the risk of occurrence of new cases of statelessness occurring; and the naturalization of stateless persons.
Given the focus of the 1954 Convention on the standards of treatment for stateless people, UNHCR last year launched a 10-year campaign to eradicate statelessness by 2024, which seeks greater political commitment to resolve protracted situations of statelessness and to prevent new situations of mass statelessness due to state succession or arbitrary deprivation of nationality.
UNHCR opened an office in Tajikistan in 1993, when the country was torn by civil war two years after the country declared its independence from the Soviet Union. That year, Tajikistan became the first country in Central Asia to accede to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. It was also the first country in the region to adopt national refugee legislation. UNHCR has helped people displaced by the civil war to return home as well as assisting refugees.
