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Bhutanese refugees: Repatriation EU priority
KATHMANDU, JAN 26 -
A group of human rights defenders in Europe has started a campaign to garner international support to pressurise the Bhutanese government to initiate the repartition of Bhutanese refugees willing to return to their country with dignity.
As part of their campaign, representatives of Bhutanese Advocacy Forum Europe (BAF-Europe) have appealed to the European Commission (EC) to support their cause.
In response to the appeal, EU leaders have expressed ‘dissatisfaction’ over the way Bhutan is dealing with its citizens living in Nepal and India for the last seventeen years as refugees, according to Ram Bahadur Karki Chhetri, Country Co-ordinator for the Netherlands BAF-Europe.
“We are not satisfied with Bhutan government for its unsatisfactory cooperation with regard to repatriation of Bhutanese refugees willing to go back to Bhutan” Jean-Christian Remond, Head of the Unit for India, Nepal and Bhutan at the EC, was quoted as saying.
In response, EC officials assured that EC was closely monitoring the status of around 80,000 Bhutanese who were deprived of various rights, including the voting rights in Bhutan’s 2008 general election.
During the meeting, BAF-Europe delegates urged EU officials to prioritise the repatriation issue at their next meeting with Bhutan scheduled for April.
The delegates stated that implementation of “ethnic cleansing policies” like “one nation one people,” Citizenship Act of 1985 and other discriminatory policies of the late eighties constituted the crux of the refugee issue.
The BAF-Europe delegation was headed by its chief coordinator Durga Giri.
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