Statelessness of Remaining Bhutanese Refugees

After more than 113,000 Lhotshampa refugees were relocated from eastern Nepal under the third-country resettlement programme between 2007 and the early 2020s, international attention largely shifted away from those who remained. Yet the closure of UNHCR's formal protection mandate in the camps did not resolve the situation of the estimated 6,000 to 7,000 Bhutanese refugees who chose not to participate in resettlement. These individuals — many of them elderly, many motivated by an unwillingness to abandon hope of return to Bhutan — now inhabit a legal no-man's land that is one of the most acute unresolved consequences of the Bhutanese refugee crisis.

Their situation was thrown into sharp relief in 2025 when a new dimension of statelessness emerged: Bhutanese refugees who had been resettled in the United States and subsequently deported under the Trump administration's expanded enforcement regime were refused entry into Bhutan, left stranded first in India and then returned to Nepal — where authorities arrested them and placed them under an exit ban in former camp facilities. Their plight illustrated that statelessness is not merely a legacy of the 1990s expulsions but an ongoing and evolving condition.

Legal Status of Non-Resettled Refugees

The legal situation of the remaining refugees in Nepal is defined by a series of overlapping exclusions. Bhutan does not recognise them as citizens; their citizenship was stripped under the 1985 Citizenship Act and subsequent legislative measures, and the Bhutanese government has consistently declined to accept their repatriation in any significant numbers. Nepal is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and has historically refused to extend citizenship rights to Bhutanese refugees, though in May 2022 Nepal granted limited rights to work — a partial concession that falls far short of the legal security of citizenship or permanent residency. UNHCR formally concluded its camp-based protection mandate as resettlement was completed, leaving the non-resettled population without the protection of the international refugee regime.

The practical consequences are severe:

• They cannot legally own property in Nepal
• Access to public services including healthcare and education is restricted or unreliable
• Without recognised identity documents, interactions with the Nepali state — banking, formal employment, travel — are fraught with difficulty
• Organisations such as GCRPPB that advocate for their right of return to Bhutan have received little support from either the Bhutanese or Nepali governments

The 2025 Deportation Crisis and Its Complications

The 2025 deportation crisis added a new population of stateless individuals to this already vulnerable group. Bhutanese refugees deported from the United States — some of whom had lived in America for over a decade — arrived at Paro Airport in Bhutan in March 2025, only to be refused entry by Bhutanese authorities and expelled to India. From India, they crossed into Nepal, where they were detained by Nepali authorities. The Supreme Court of Nepal, responding to a habeas corpus petition, ordered in April 2025 that four of the individuals be placed in former refugee camp facilities rather than deported — but imposed an exit ban, effectively creating a new form of camp detention for people who had been legal US residents.

CNN, NPR, and other international outlets covered the deportees' situation in 2025, noting that neither Bhutan, Nepal, nor the United States appeared willing to take responsibility for individuals caught between the withdrawal of American protection and the absence of any other citizenship claim. Human Rights Watch had documented the foundational injustice as early as 2003, noting that Bhutanese refugees in Nepal had been "rendered stateless" by the combination of Bhutanese citizenship revocation and Nepali non-recognition.

International Response

The remaining refugees receive limited sustained international attention. The UNHCR considers its mandate largely fulfilled through the resettlement programme. Bilateral talks between Bhutan and Nepal — which had produced no repatriation in eighteen rounds of discussions between 1993 and 2003 — have remained effectively stalled. The Bhutan-Nepal bilateral framework offers little prospect of resolution, and academic analysts writing in the International Journal of Transitional Justice in 2024 characterised the situation as "transitions without justice."

References

1. "Transitions without Justice: Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal." International Journal of Transitional Justice, Oxford Academic, vol. 18, no. 2, 2024. https://academic.oup.com/ijtj/article/18/2/267/7633472
2. "Forced from Bhutan, deported by the US: these stateless Himalayan people are in a unique limbo." CNN, July 2025. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/18/asia/bhutan-refugees-trump-deportations-nepal-intl-hnk
3. "Bhutanese Refugees Deported from U.S., Arrested in Nepal, and Sent to Refugee Camp Under Exit Ban After Court Order." NepYork, April 2025. https://nepyork.com/2025/04/26/bhutanese-refugees-deported-from-u-s-arrested-in-nepal-and-sent-to-refugee-camp-under-exit-ban-after-court-order/
4. "Nepal: Bhutanese Refugees Rendered Stateless." Human Rights Watch, June 2003. https://www.hrw.org/news/2003/06/18/nepal-bhutanese-refugees-rendered-stateless
5. "A refugee deported to Bhutan by the U.S. finds himself stranded and stateless." NPR, July 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/16/g-s1-77553/trump-refugee-deportation-asian-bhutan-nepal