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Government officials and partners posed for a group photo on Monday at Pyramid Hotel

Government, partners hold symposium to mitigate number of stateless persons

The Directorate of Civil Registry, Nationality, Passport and Immigration in collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) and the European Union delegation on Monday organized a symposium to mitigate several stateless persons in South Sudan.

Simon Majur Pabek, the Director General for Civil Registry, Nationality, Passport, and Immigration, said that they have been documenting stateless persons since 2012.

“We started after we gained independence, there were a lot of our nationals coming from refugee camps and Sudan who need documentation,” said Pabek during the opening of the 6-day training on nationality documentation and mitigation of the risk of statelessness held at Pyramid Hotel in Juba.

The directorate of civil registry, nationality, passport, and immigration is being supported to undertake this initiative by UNHCR and EU.

Pabek said that some of the stateless persons lack official documents, adding they have so far registered 4,000 such cases in Bor town and more than 5,000 in Yei River County.

Lothar Jaschke, Deputy  Head of Delegation for the European Union in South Sudan, said that millions of people in the world are excluded from benefiting from social income distribution due to a lack of documents.

He revealed that the symposium marks a crucial step in the journey to address the challenges facing returnees and internally displaced persons to secure documents.

“Non-documentation contributes to imbalance of social-income distribution, today we can make tiny but very essential contributions to rectify this injustice and to make the world a better place,” said Jaschke.

Sanaa Omer, Deputy Country Representative for UNHCR, said they support the government to ease the acquisition process of nationality documents and mitigate statelessness in the country.

 “In 2024, we have witnessed remarkable progress in our fight against statelessness, the endorsement of the 1954 Convention relating to the status of stateless persons, and the 1961 Convention on the reduction of statelessness by the president is a big achievement,” said Omer.

John Dabi, Deputy Commissioner of the Commission for Refugee Affairs (CRA), said South Sudan has in place a policy for addressing the issue of statelessness, adding that they are coordinating with the directorate of civil registry, nationality, passport, and immigration and UNHCR to mitigate statelessness.

“We are focusing on addressing the issue of statelessness, the policy level already accepts that we must have a civil registry framework and simple registry process to address the issue of statelessness,” said Dabi.

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