Ensure Hafsar's voice is heard at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva

Hafsar is a stateless person, a Rohingya activist, and a refugee advocate from Myanmar who was resettled in Auckland earlier this year on our refugee quota, after living for a decade as a refugee in Thailand and Malaysia. This fundraiser has been set up - with Hafsar's blessing - to raise the money to cover the costs of her obtaining a Swiss visa as a stateless person living in Auckland, so that she can attend the UNHCR's third preparatory meeting of the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva in early November.

Since moving to Aotearoa, Hafsar has been invited to attend multiple conferences in Europe to talk about the plight of stateless people. In two weeks' time she is due to participate in the UNHCR's third preparatory meeting of the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, a meeting which will help lay the foundations for the first Global Refugee Forum, to be held in December. The necessity for Hafsar to attend this meeting and be heard in this context, as a stateless, Rohingya, refugee-background woman, cannot be over-stated.

The UNHCR are covering all of Hafsar's costs to attend the meeting, including flights, accommodation, and per diems. Unfortunately, they are not covering the cost of obtaining a visa, which - for Hafsar, as a stateless person without a passport - involves flying down to Wellington next week for an in-person meeting and biometric submission at the Swiss Embassy.

The necessity for this trip to Wellington was only confirmed this week (the last week of October). Hafsar has previously obtained a visa for and traveled to Switzerland and the Schengen Zone (in June she participated in the 2019 World Conference on Statelessness in the Hague, Netherlands, and in July she was the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network representative at the UNHCR consultation with NGOs in Geneva), and has only just found out that the bio metric details she submitted for her previous visa have not been retained.

The cost of flights between Auckland and Wellington is high due to the late notice - $471 return. There is also the cost of travel to and from Auckland airport, which is approximately $30 return. She has a friend to transport her to and from Wellington Airport. Hafsar is currently a student in social work at Manukau Institute of Technology, working part time as an interpreter for Red Cross, and $500 is totally unaffordable for her. If she ever has any spare money, she sends it home to help her parents and siblings, including her severely disabled brother, back in Myanmar. It is her hope that one day she will be able to bring them to New Zealand so that they get to live out their final years as legal citizens of somewhere for the first time in their lives.

The prohibitive cost for Hafsar, as a stateless person, to access a visa to Switzerland should not prevent stateless refugees/people with refugee backgrounds having a voice at the Global Refugee Forum. Let's make sure Hafsar gets to Geneva.