Thailand’s international obligations 4. Thailand has acceded to the core international human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), and the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). Thailand has made reservations and interpretive declarations to all of these treaties. Most notable for this submission is the reservation to the protection of child refugees and asylum seekers (CRC, article 22), interpretive declarations regarding the definition and criminalisation of torture (CAT, resp. articles 1 and 4) and on the freedom of movement, the right to acquire, change and not be arbitrarily deprived of nationality (CRPD, article 18). 5. Thailand has not acceded to the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons or the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. The hill tribe people in Thailand 6. It is estimated that over half a million of the hill tribe people living in Thailand are stateless,2 making them one of the largest stateless groups in the world. Hill tribe people, also known as ‘Highlanders’, is a collective name for the multitude of different, ethnic and indigenous tribes that have traditionally lived in the mountainous Northern and Western areas of Thailand, primarily along the borders with Lao PDR and Myanmar. 7. The statelessness of many of the hill tribe people in Thailand stems from a combination of problems relating to the country’s nationality, civil registration and immigration regulations, in particular those in force during the second half of the 20th century. In the 1950s, Thailand first started to systematically document its nationals. The people who were not registered ended up stateless. For many, the cause of exclusion was the poor enumeration of people and sometimes entire villages that were situated in remote and hard to reach areas, where there was no regular interaction with the Thai authorities. Citizenship was also an unknown concept for some people and so they did not deem it important to get registered.3 8. Surveys were later conducted to try to fill in the gaps in the enumeration of the population, but those who were not registered as Thai nationals before were not deemed to be so during these subsequent exercises either. Instead, temporary statuses were granted and different minority groups were issued with cards of different colours which identified the holder’s temporary status while awaiting a more durable solution. Some, but not all, were subsequently granted permanent residence and even nationality. Those who continued to be affected by statelessness also faced difficulties accessing the civil registration system and as a consequence their children’s births often went unregistered, leaving them without any proof of identity. 2 As estimated by the Thai government. Via UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Global Trends 2013, Table 1, June 2014, available at: http://www.unhcr. org/5399a14f9.html. Note that there are also many hill tribe people who do enjoy citizenship in Thailand. 3 C Rijken, L van Waas, M Gramatikov & D Brennan, The Nexus between Statelessness and Human Trafficking in Thailand. Wolf Legal Publishers (2015).