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The Herald, 2 May, 1981
LONDON. — Dr Kaisevelloo Goonum, who became a stateless person when the South African authorities refused to renew her passport during an English visit, has applied for travel documents from the British Home Office.
She said she has been invited by the Minister of Health, Dr Herbert Ushewokunze, to live and work in Zimbabwe, and plans to leave Britain as soon as she obtains the documents.
Dr Goonum came to Britain from Durban in May 1978 to spend a year seeing how British family planning clinics operated.
While she was here her passport expired, and when she applied for it to be renewed she was told by a spokesman at the consulate that the authorities had decided to cancel it.
Lessons For Today
- In terms of international law, a person is classified as stateless when they cease to be a national of any state under the operation of its law. Some refugees can be classified as stateless persons.
- When a person becomes stateless, international law dictates that the state in which the person will be staying in should accord that person or persons the right to choose where they want to stay and to allow them to move freely within their territory.
- The characteristics of stateless people are having no legal identity, passport, no vote and no access to things like education.
- Legal experts postulate that there are two categories of statelessness: de jure and de facto statelessness. De jure stateless refers to a situation where a person meets the international legal definition of statelessness: they do not have a nationality under the laws of any country.
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