21 stateless people get Thai ID cards, 224 waitlisted

Justice Minister Somsak Thepsuthin said on Tuesday that the 21 hill tribes people had got their Thai ID cards after he instructed the DSI to verify Thai nationality of stateless people who live in the northern provinces to help them get ID cards as soon as possible.

Somsak said the 21 people live in Chiang Mai’s Om Koi district. The DSI has also conducted preliminary investigations to confirm Thai citizenship of 224 more residents of Om Koi. They have to undergo DNA checks before they will be given Thai ID cards, Somsak added.

He said he gave the instruction to the DSI in line with the Justice Ministry’s policy to give citizenship to ethnic people who were born in the country but had become stateless people.

Somsak said these stateless people are poor and live along the northern borders and lack evidence to prove their nationality. He said 479,943 stateless people have been registered with government agencies and he had ordered the DSI to step in to help check family backgrounds of the registered stateless in the North.

Somsak said the DSI has developed an application for verifying family backgrounds of the stateless, called DSI Smart Search.

The application will use the household registration database of the Provincial Administration to search for relatives of the stateless by comparing their unique identities to those in the database.

Somsak said the application allowed the DSI to verify information 12 times faster and the verification results are 100 per cent authentic. He added that the application allowed verification of a stateless person to be done within 20 minutes.