Kyrgyz human rights lawyer wins UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award

AKIPRESS.COM - Azizbek Ashurov, a lawyer, whose work has supported the efforts of Kyrgyzstan in becoming the first country in the world to end statelessness, has been selected as the 2019 winner of the UN Refugee Agency's Nansen Refugee Award, UNHCR reports.
Through his organization Ferghana Valley Lawyers Without Borders (FVLWB), he has helped well over 10,000 people to gain Kyrgyz nationality after they became stateless following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Among them, some 2,000 children will now have the right to an education and a future with the freedom to travel, marry and work.
As part of the Soviet Union, with no internal borders in place, people moved across Central Asia with internal documentation, acquiring residency and getting married. After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and the formation of new states, many people became stranded across newly established borders, often with now invalid Soviet passports or no means to prove where they were born. This left hundreds of thousands of people stateless throughout the region, including in Kyrgyzstan.
Statelessness affects millions of people worldwide, depriving them of legal rights or basic services and leaving them politically and economically marginalized, discriminated against and particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
Motivated by his own family's difficult experience of achieving citizenship after arriving from Uzbekistan in the aftermath of the dissolution, Ashurov helped to found FVLWB in 2003 to offer free legal advice and assistance to vulnerable displaced, stateless and undocumented people in the southern part of Kyrgyzstan.
Ashurov and FVLWB formed mobile legal teams which travelled to remote areas of the south of the country to find vulnerable and socially marginalized groups. In their mountainous country, the mobile legal teams relied on a battered four-wheel drive or travelled on horseback.
This work in collaboration with the Kyrgyz government resulted in the country announcing in in July this year that it had ended statelessness.