Congratulations on your party’s victory in the recent elections to the National Assembly in Bhutan. We welcomed the sight of Bhutanese citizens coming out in large numbers to participate in the vote and begin a democratic political system.

Bill Frelick examines the plight of Bhutan's stateless ethnic Nepalese.

Human Rights Watch wishes to bring to the Committee's attention information regarding the violations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child by the Bhutanese government.

The study of history provides rich lessons about the damaging effects of oppression and injustice, particularly egregious human-rights violations. One of the most important is that if legitimate claimants are brutally repressed into silence and desperation, their grievances can be exploited by those who instigate further violence. The result of this mistaken choice of war over peace is that almost everyone involved is drawn into a circle of fear and degradation in a way that leaves them even worse off.

Bhutan may profit from evocative tourist images of an isolated cloud kingdom whose people live in serenity and colorful traditional dress, but for many Bhutanese it's far from idyllic. It's a place where citizens can't get a government job, buy or sell land, or open a business without a police-issued card attesting that the bearer is not "anti-national." But it's still home - or at least it should be - for the more than 100,000 Bhutanese citizens expelled in the early 1990s.

Violent clashes this week resulting in two deaths in Nepal’s Bhutanese refugee camps underscore the need for the Nepali police to protect refugees from mob violence and ensure their right to peaceful expression.

A US offer to resettle 60,000 Bhutanese refugees has given hope to many of the 106,000 refugees living in Nepal for more than 16 years, but has also heightened tensions in the camps.

The effects of ethnic cleansing aren’t confined to places like Darfur and Kosovo. Today, over 100,000 of Bhutan’s ethnic Nepali citizens languish in refugee camps here, stripped of their citizenship and stateless. It’s a decade-long tragedy that’s only getting worse.