Stephane Jaquemet, the country representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Nepal, has said that women married to Bhutanese refugees would not be given the refugee status, but children born to mixed parents would be considered refugees.

Talking to media persons at the Beldangi-based refugee camp in Jhapa on Tuesday, he said that women of Nepali or any other nationalities cannot be considered as refugees.

“A Nepali woman cannot be a refugee in her own country,” Jaquemet clarified.

Non-Bhutanese women married to refugees have been demanding that they too be given the refugee status. They staged a hunger strike to press for their demand recently and called it off after the local administration assured them to take up their issue to the Home Ministry.   

“The job of UNHCR is to resettle Bhutanese refugees but not other nationals,” he said. “The host countries will not accept such individuals.”

The UNHCR chief, however, said children born to refugees would be given refugee status regardless of the origin of their mothers. There are around 1,200 non-refugee women demanding refugee status on the ground of their marriage to refugees.

Published on: 30 November 2011 | The Kathmandu Post