An article in today’s edition of The Guardian gives an outstanding insight and account of the plight of a stateless person.
Statelessness is a topic close to my heart, as many of you know, in 2017 Ruth and I made a donation to Melbourne Law School to support the development of the world’s only academic centre devoted to the problem of statelessness. The ‘Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness’ will examine the causes and extent of statelessness around the world; crucial in the current global environment in which a child is born into statelessness every ten minutes. This initiative will help raise public awareness and understanding of an issue affecting more than 10 million people around the world today.
You can discover more on this topic through today’s article about what the journey of a stateless person may look like. To give you an idea…
“He doesn’t know where he was born, or when. He has few documents to demonstrate who he is or where he comes from.
He believes, but cannot prove, he was born in Spain’s Canary Islands, to a mother from Western Sahara – a barren, contested wedge of land in north-west Africa. He knows nothing about his father.
Orphaned as a child, he was trafficked into mainland Europe where he was kept as a house slave in Belgium before escaping, living on the streets of Paris and Frankfurt, and falling in with criminal gangs in Norway.
He has lived a life on the peripheries of every society he has known and concedes that includes an existence sometimes outside of the law. He admits to traveling on false passports, he says, because it is impossible for a person without a country to gain one legitimately.
Imasi arrived in Australia – by plane and intending only to pass through – in January 2010.”…
