The Plight of the Rightless: Mapping and Understanding Statelessness in Tripoli-V1.3 Appendix C - Case Studies The Case of Thailand Thailand has the third largest population of stateless in the world, reaching around 1,000,000 individuals. Most of them are members of various ethnic minorities living in highland areas, nomads living at the borders and children of ancestors who fled neighbouring countries in warzones. As such, in 2008, Thailand began taking action to reduce statelessness and prevent future births of stateless individuals. One of the first measures taken by Thailand was removing racial discrimination from its civil registration law, in order to allow children born to non-Thai parents in Thailand to register and acquire a birth certificate. Secondly, in 2010, Thailand developed an online birth registration programme by the Ministry of Interior to link hospitals and district registration offices. As such, once a birth is registered at the hospital, the registrar officials receives all the data and is prompted to issue a birth certificate. Consequently, officials can contact parents who have not yet registered their child’s birth after leaving hospitals. In parallel, Thailand began publicly raising awareness on the importance of registration through the distribution of manuals on nationality and civil registration all around the country. It also took action towards building the capacity of local civil registration officials through trainings held annually. Thailand’s awareness raising campaign actually started since 2008 through establishing community networks to improve villagers’ ability to advise others in their community on civil registration. In addition to that, it created a dedicated “Nationality Clinic” government website for information and counselling, and initiated a helpline for providing advice on registration and documentation. As a result, by 2017, 159,831 children of stateless parents and 454 foundlings had benefited from these reforms by accessing their right for civil registration and more than 681 hospitals adopted the online registration system. The Thai government also benefited from up-to-date statistics on birth rates and population trends, which helped it better manage resources and development plans.71 The Case of Jordan Since the outbreak of the Syrian war, Jordan has hosted over 650,000 Syrian refugees in addition to more than 82,000 refugees from other countries such as Iraq, Yemen and Sudan.72 A large number of these vulnerable groups, especially Syrian refugees, lack one or all means of selfidentification. This could either be due to civil registries being destroyed during the Syrian war or lost or confiscated documents while fleeing Syria. As such, these persons have become stateless 71 UNHCR, Good Practice Paper - Action 7: Ensuring birth registration for the prevention of statelessness (2017). 72 UNHCR, Fact Sheet: Jordan February 2018 (UNHCR, 2018). 64