A lawmaker representing Northern Bar el Ghazal State under SSOA, Peter Mabior, faulted the country’s priorities in handling issues, arguing the government should tackle the problem arising from the displacement of people before turning eyes on statelessness.
“We are a country that is good [in making laws] but we are also good in breaking them. It’s actually a mockery of what we do as a country.”
Mabior lamented that despite having Internally Displaced People in South Sudan, who still need to be supported, the country is ironically adopting the convention on statelessness.
The lawmaker was speaking yesterday in Juba during the ratification of the convention on the reduction of statelessness 1961 and the convention relating to the status of stateless persons 1954.
“We have IDPs in South Sudan who are actually protected from their own government; this in my opinion if we want to solve issues of refuges let us solve the internal issues also.”
According to him, the issues of IDPs could have first been settled before ratifying the international conventions.
“It’s very important that we deal with our IDPs, let us look into their cases where some people have no land because their land have been occupied and the government is not able to deal with it,” he pleaded.
“If you want to adopt this report, let us work on our internal issues. We also have cases where individuals were expelled from South Sudan,” he alleged.
To him, South Sudan has benefited from international goodwill because majority of the people are refugees.
“Let us also help South Sudanese who are refugees outside our country…this is one of the agreements that we signed,” he stressed.
The ratified convention is to prevent statelessness by giving the people an identity.
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