There are about 500,000 stateless people in Thailand, of whom over 100,000 are children. Recently, various national agencies, supported by UNHCR and Unicef, hosted a national consultation on statelessness. It was a timely opportunity to identify preferred directions.
The long and winding road is due to a variety of factors. The laws and policies on birth registration, nationality, residency, immigration and related factors run into hundreds of pages (400 according to one compilation). They are compounded by piecemeal responses through cabinet resolutions and security concerns which split people into different categories according to how they are viewed for the purpose of acceptability.
