Ceylon Citizenship Act, No 18 results in over 700,000 Indian origin plantation workers becoming stateless persons.
Photography courtesy of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
Extract from the multimedia piece, To Escape or Maximise? The estate worker’s dilemma. Produced by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) and based on their study Changes and Tensions in the Tea and Rubber Plantations of Sri Lanka (2008). The trailer can be viewed at http://cepa.lk/estates.
Sources
Statelessness in Sri Lanka, UNHCR 2007; Changes and Tensions in the Tea and Rubber Plantations of Sri Lanka (2008)
Quotation
“This Act provided citizenship to people born before 15 November 1948 but required that two generations of the person’s family had been born in Sri Lanka. This essentially discriminated against Hill Tamils, many of whom returned to Tamil Nadu to give birth and most of whom could no produce documents to prove two generations of family born in Sri Lanka,” UNHCR, 2007.
“Today justice is being denied to the Indian Tamils. Some day in the future when language becomes and issue, the same fate would befall the Ceylon Tamils. It is therefore necessary that we oppose this Bill unitedly,” S.J.V. Chelvanayakam, Parliamentary Debates, Hansard, 10 December 1948.
Related events
18 December 1948
1949
29 October 1964
1974
1982
1988
