On Wednesday, four of the 13 Wild Boars football team members who survived harrowing days of intense deprivation in the dark Tham Luang cave in Chiang Rai last month became Thai citizens. No longer subject to the deprivations of being statelessness, they can now look forward to living lives with real purpose.
They can accept an invitation from Manchester United to travel to the UK and watch a football match or travel freely in their own country to play in football matches. They can apply for government scholarships for college and they can earn diplomas. They can now work and provide for their own families and they can and will confer citizenship when they have their own children.
This is, indeed, a moment to celebrate. However, as someone who has worked on the issue of statelessness in northern Thailand for years, I contend that the "conferral" of citizenship to the four Wild Boars and 26 other people in Chiang Rai's Mae Sai district should be a call to action. Thailand can and should be the global leader in statelessness eradication, and the time to act is now.
Citizenship is an ordinary right for ordinary people. Stateless people should not have to perform extraordinary feats to have their legal citizenship officially recognised.
My question is this: According to the law, would the Wild Boars be any less deserving of citizenship had they not survived more than two weeks in a cave?
What about the case of Naroi Jatoeng? In 2009, Naroi, a then-15-year-old stateless girl from the Lahu ethnic community, won a national contest and a trip to China; but without citizenship, she would be unable to travel. Further investigations of her circumstances revealed that although she was the child of Thai citizens, her parents had never registered her birth due to the high cost of travel to the district centre. Rather than recognising her Thai citizenship outright, initial discussions included whether or not to issue her special travel documents.
Earlier that same year, Mong Thongdee, a then-12-year-old child of ethnic Shan migrant workers from Myanmar, won a different national competition. With the support of the country, he was granted papers to travel to Japan for international competition, and the promise of citizenship. As of last year, he still remained stateless. What more must he prove?
And as recently as last month, Aryo Megag, a stateless Akha high school student, had been issued special dispensation by the Ministry of the Interior to travel to Hong Kong to compete in the International Robotics Olympiad, but it remains unclear as to whether his statelessness will be resolved as well.
In each of these cases, the state responds by issuing special dispensations to these undoubtedly special children. Yet, so often these dispensations fall short of what is owed outright to these children and their families by virtue of their most fundamental legal and human rights. The fact that we encounter these children on a regular basis should not be seen as a failure of these children to prove themselves worthy of citizenship. Their statelessness is a failure of the state to resolve the problem efficiently and systematically. For each Wild Boar or Naroi Jatoeng, there are thousands of legal citizens who await the recognition they are owed.
The Thai government is partially responsible for producing statelessness, and it, therefore, has a responsibility to resolve it now.
The reasons for statelessness in Thailand is complex. On one hand, statelessness is a consequence of poor registration or even denationalisation of people in neighbouring states followed by unregistered or semi-registered residence in Thailand. Yet, research also indicates that unknown numbers of people are stateless because the Thai state failed to properly register people decades ago. Specifically, my research, and that of excellent Thai scholars, Mukdawan Sakboon, Chayan Vaddhanaputi, Pinkaew Laungaramsri and Prasit Leepreecha, has shown that state surveys of minority peoples were often flawed, incomplete, and misunderstood by minority peoples themselves.
Yet, the problematic documents produced in fraught circumstances nevertheless comprise the baseline of proof against which claims to citizenship are adjudicated. In essence, when applying to have their citizenship recognised, stateless people are required to mobilise evidence that is flawed, incomplete, and sometimes altogether nonexistent. Adding insult to injury, aberrations in evidence are often read by district chiefs as moral and legal deficiencies associated with individual applicants rather than as problems associated with the state's registration and adjudication process itself.
Without reliable, baseline evidence for adjudicating citizenship, the government will never resolve statelessness by processing applicants on a case-by-case basis. Because part of the cause of statelessness in Thailand is located in the state's registration and adjudication process itself, a sweeping political action to resolve statelessness is warranted.
The political climate is ripe for resolving statelessness in Thailand.
The political conditions for the advancement of human rights in the country are currently extremely challenging. However, the potential to address statelessness has improved substantially in comparison to previous decades. In the past, the government would not even recognise statelessness as a problem. Twenty years ago, advocates like Chutima "Miju" Morlaeku fought for recognition of citizenship of minority peoples at the risk of their own lives. Due to her work and the work of countless others, the political climate has shifted, and Thailand now recognises statelessness as a problem and maintains an official registration of the resident stateless population.
Thailand is capable of resolving statelessness for hundreds of thousands of people today.
While the Thai government has resolved to work with the UN to eradicate statelessness by 2024, substantial evidence suggests that it is unlikely to meet this goal without instituting a substantial policy change. Data from a 2010 Unesco survey of over 70,000 highlanders located in the northern and northwestern border villages suggest that while most stateless people benefited from policy changes instituted the early 2000s, the rate of resolution to statelessness began stalling in 2005. Last year, the UNHCR celebrated Thailand's success in "granting" citizenship to more than 23,000 people between 2012 and 2017 -- a five-year rate of 4,600 people per year. Yet, with an official count of 438,821 stateless residents in 2017, this rate is far from sufficient in meeting the stated deadline.
All is not lost, however. Because the Thai government has committed to ending statelessness and also maintains an official registration of its stateless population, the state possesses the heretofore unattainable ability to recognise as citizens all individuals currently registered as stateless. Thailand can and should set a new baseline for inclusion for those who have been excluded thus far and establish humane, efficient procedures to adjudicate future citizenship claims.
Indeed, because of its extensive registration programmes, Thailand stands to address a problem of its own creation with major policy reform.
Protracted statelessness in Thailand signals a protracted injustice. When stateless people are officially recognised as citizens, we should celebrate that the state is doing its job. In Thailand, this job can and should be done better. With the global celebrity and moral weight of the Wild Boars, Thailand should use this occasion to be a world leader in statelessness resolution and grant amnesty to its stateless people without delay.
Amanda Flaim is a former research consultant at Unesco in Bangkok and a research associate at the Centre for Ethnic Studies and Development at Chiang Mai University. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at James Madison College of Public Affairs, Michigan State University.