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The Challenge: Raising Public Awareness and Support

Thai citizenship has historically been granted to stateless individuals on a case-by-case basis. The appeals process for basic human rights is full of catch-22s. How, for example, do you prove your birth if you were never issued a birth certificate? Appeals can take as long as 15 years, and even then, there is a good chance that Thai citizenship will be denied.

Representatives of the United Nations (U.N.) see a solution in wide-spread policy change, but statelessness remains a mostly unknown, under-the-radar, issue. Political support must be accompanied with public support if wide-spread policy change is ever to occur, and public support cannot occur without public awareness.
 
According to an expert on the issue of statelessness within the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are roughly 20 humanitarian workers worldwide who focus solely on the issue of statelessness in a world harboring over 15 million stateless people. This is a feeble ratio which does not instill confidence for any imminent change. A problem cannot be solved by a world unaware of it.

Our Solution: Documenting Statelessness through Video

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2011 marked the first day in our documentary film production on statelessness in Thailand. We will continue to follow the story of one of our Higher Education as Humanitarian Aid scholarship students, as she works to complete her appeal for Thai citizenship, and document our new partnership with the Thai Committee for Refugees. We will visit Ban Rom Klao 4 School, and meet the stateless children who will be the first to be integrated into a government school. Most importantly, we will respectfully document the voices and lives of stateless individuals who, until now, have never been given the opportunity to have their stories told.
 
Our goals will be to make this documentary widely available for free on YouTube, to enter it into festivals, and to share copies with governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, international news/media, and institutions of higher education.
 
Statelessness is a solvable problem that demands urgent attention. Our hope is that this documentary will serve as an important first step towards universal public awareness.

This project has been fully funded through the
generous support of a discretionary grant from the