Azernews.Az

BAKU – An international conference aiming to discuss ways of reducing the number of people without citizenship and protecting their rights was held in Baku on Friday.

The discussions aimed to exchange views on the causes of the problem and measures being taken to reduce the number of non-citizens in Azerbaijan, said Arun Sala-Ngarm, the Representative in Azerbaijan of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one of the event organizers.

A representative of the UNHCR head office said there are 12 million such persons in the world, though the official figure is 6.6 million.

"Most of the people without citizenship are in Asia, mainly in Thailand, Nepal. We have no accurate information about the number of such people in India and Pakistan, but we suppose their number is large as well."

The UNHCR official said there are 2,700 such people in Azerbaijan, but an Interior Ministry official did not confirm the figure. He said that it made up 1,954 as of 2007, after which the ministry has not kept the statistics.

"If the Interior Ministry granted only 1,954 certificates, the figure could not have increased that much ever since," the official said.

Council of Europe Ambassador Veronika Kotek recalled that the CoE adopted a convention on protecting the rights of people without citizenship in 1997, expressing hope that Azerbaijan would ratify the document.