78 Tibetan refugees granted local residency

Forty of them have obtained residency cards and work permits, the commission said. For the other 38 whose applications are being reviewed, the commission said it will provide services such as job-matching, emergency aid, medical care, and counseling.

According to amendments to the Immigration Act that were passed in January, stateless people from India and Nepal who entered Taiwan on fake passports between May 21, 1999 and Dec. 31, 2007, and refugees who were classified as Tibetans and overstayed their time in Taiwan are eligible to apply for residency certificates.

The law was amended after more than 100 Tibetan refugees living in Taiwan without proper documents staged a sit-in at Liberty Square in Taipei last December to ask the government to grant them asylum.

Most of the refugees had years ago crossed the Himalayas into Nepal or India and entered Taiwan with visitor visas in forged Nepalese or Indian passports.

Lacking valid identity documents, they became illegal residents in Taiwan and since they are stateless, they have no country to be sent back to, even though Taiwan's laws stipulate they should be deported for overstaying their visas.

Under the law, the commission is in charge of verifying the identities of Tibetans, while the National Immigration Agency is responsible for certifying the identities of many others who are stateless and for determining their eligibility to apply for refugee status.

Earlier this year, the commission said, it set up a panel to review 134 applications for Tibetan identification, and the panel's decisions were sent to the National Immigration Agency for approval in September.

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