Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I'm 30 years old,
and a month ago, I got my first passport.
For most people, like you, it's just a technicality,
a document in the shape of a small book, with a colored cover,
that allows you to travel.
But, for me,
it was life.
It was a sign that I belong somewhere.
You know why?
Because I've lived my entire life as a stateless person.
Do you know what "stateless person" is?
A human can get her or his nationality in two ways:
from the land where you were born or from the bloodline.
Take Italy.
If you're born in Italy, you're not Italian.
If your parents are, then you can get the Italian passport.
But millions of people around the world have neither option,
like me.
I was born in Lebanon.
Lebanon gives you nationality only if your father is Lebanese.
But my parents are Syrian.
My mom is Muslim and my father is Christian.
When they decided to get married,
in Syria, the inter-religious marriage is illegal.
So, in 1985,
they went to a neighboring country,
to Lebanon.
They tried to get married there.
They could just get married in a church ceremony,
but never register it.
Soon after,
my sister, my brother and I were born.
Neither my mother nor my father could confer onto us their nationality.
We were born as stateless people.
For us,
it was a normal life.
We're going to live it, and then we're going to grow up.
We didn't even know what challenges and problems were waiting for us.
The first problem we faced was in school,
when my mother wanted to register us in school
and she had to beg every single director.
She went to three schools, and we were denied,
because the first question they asked her,
"Who are they? Where are their documents?"
As we didn't have anything, they just turned us away.
Then, luckily,
in Lebanon, we had a civil war,
and not all officials were paying attention to the rules.
My mom could convince another school,
and an Armenian school accepted us.
So I started studying.
The most beautiful one.
(Laughter)
Just like everyone else,
same uniform, same teachers and same education.
I felt life is easy,
that we don't have anything.
If you look at us,
we seem three teenagers,
Souad, Eddy and me,
three teenagers living their life, hoping and dreaming of a better future.
But that wasn't the reality.
Everything that you take for granted in your life,
we didn't have.
We were facing challenges and problems every single day.
I have a severe allergy.
The name is urticaria.
When it attacks me,
I should run to the hospital to be attended to.
Unfortunately, the first question they ask,
"Where are your documents?"
Every time I should go, I had to take my best friend Nicole with me
to be admitted under her name.
I remember one day Nicole showed me a passport,
a vaccination passport of her own dog.
Yes,
her dog had the right to medical care.
I didn't,
neither my brother nor my sister.
The smallest things that I used to live every single day
reminded me over and over that I'm a stateless person.
Going to buy a SIM card,
or going to a club to enjoy with your friends,
the first question, "Where is your document?"
As I don't have anything to present,
then I couldn't do it.
Imagine if I needed a credit card or health insurance.
That was kind of impossible.
I really wanted to be a professional basketball player.
I'm not that tall, but I'm really fast.
(Laughter)
I had the skills, but not the magic documents.
The biggest fear we had
was just walking on the street and seeing a checkpoint,
because every time I see a police checkpoint,
I have to run to the other side
because I don't have a document to present whenever I am stopped.
When I finished school, I really wanted to study.
I wanted to do medicine.
I had good grades.
And then, at the first university I went to with my grades,
hoping that they could listen to me and to my case,
the admission officer just took the documents
and threw them on my face.
He said, "If you're Lebanese, you can study.
If you're a foreigner, you can study as well.
We're not joking here. Who are you?"
Deep inside, I knew,
"That's a dream, that's impossible. I will never be able to study."
But I really wanted to.
So I simply [made] a list of all the universities in Lebanon
and then went to one after the other,
begging and asking, "Please, I need to study."
Until I found one.
They accepted me as a favor,
and they told me, "Welcome.
We don't have Medicine,
but we have Information Systems Management."
So I said, "That's okay."
I started studying,
and I even went further
and I did my MBA degree and I graduated with a master's degree.
And now?
What am I supposed to do?
I finished school,
I cannot work, I cannot live, I cannot travel.
What future is waiting for me?
Would I dare to have kids
and put them in the same situation that I am?
Would I dare to dream?
I had to choose.
So,
I started sending [out] my story.
I wrote a card and started sending it [out] all over the world,
inside Lebanon, to Syria, to everywhere, to anyone I could reach,
and I got replies.
Many embassies replied to me.
They simply denied me.
I was refused.
The only country that accepted my case
was Brazil.
(Cheering) (Applause)
But not because I was stateless.
Because in 2014,
Brazil opened the door
with a humanitarian visa for Syrian refugees.
Again, the chaos of war helped me to start a new life.
Start a new life!
But in a country named Brazil,
the only two things I know about it
are the football players and the amazing Carnival.
Where should I go? Where am I going to sleep?
What will I do?
How am I going to live my life there? How am I going to survive?
But I said, "I'm ready for the challenge."
Me, my sister and my brother,
we went to the unknown,
to Brazil.
We said, "We're ready for a new beginning."
When I got there, I used to speak four languages:
Arabic, English, Armenian and French.
But not Portuguese.
And I had my master's degree,
but I couldn't find a job.
The only job that I could do at that time was pamphleting,
distributing pamphlets, me and Eddy, on the streets.
You can see this big smile on our faces, yes.
We were really happy to be able to work legally
for the first time in our life.
And we started learning Portuguese on napkins
because we needed to integrate into society.
A few months later, I got a better job.
I started working as an operation manager in the import and export of cattle,
but it wasn't a good job by any means.
I was always underpaid.
Me, my sister and my brother, we were working,
but we were underpaid because of our status.
With all this, even with all the struggling,
we were optimistic.
We were three adults, happy and ready to wait.
In Brazil, at that time, we didn't have a law for stateless people.
Stateless people didn't have a law.
But we were three adults,
happy and dreaming that one day, Brazil was going to change the laws.
On May 30, 2016, we were approved as refugees.
And who between you wants to be a refugee, or dreams about it?
That was my dream.
That was my dream because with the refugee status in Brazil,
I could get my first document, my first residency ever,
with my photo and my name,
with the right to stay there for five years,
in the same territory, legally.
I had the right to live, to work, to dream, to believe,
to have a bank account,
and to have all the basic rights that I'd never had.
But life is cruel,
life is really bad,
because exactly after one month of this happiness,
I lost my brother.
He was killed ...
He was stopped by drugged up adolescents
that were trying to rob him.
The only thing that they took from him was his life.
My brother,
he died as a stateless person.
Eddy ...
I will always miss him.
I will always miss you.
And he was lucky enough,
because one month before, he got his residency.
What's that supposed to mean?
It means he got his death certificate.
Why?
Because stateless people, they don't have a birth certificate,
and stateless people, they don't have a death certificate.
They're just born, live and just leave,
like a shadow, like people that have never existed.
I used to think it was only me, my brother and my sister
in this situation,
that it was only the three of us.
But when I started working more closely with the UNHCR
and discovered their new campaign to end statelessness, "I Belong,"
I saw that in the world,
there 10 million stateless people.
Imagine the size of the population of a country
like Portugal.
Imagine a whole population that doesn't have any right
to exist or to belong.
So I said, "I need to do something."
I started sharing my story with everyone.
I did many documentaries, journals, [speeches],
anyone and everywhere,
wherever they'd invite me to and give me the space to share my story.
I started to raise my voice.
I started to explain to people
that statelessness is a human rights problem.
In the laws,
there is a simple thing we can do,
which is just try to change them.
Imagine if I was born
and I could get my Syrian mother's nationality,
if my mom could pass her nationality on to me.
I would maybe today be a doctor,
living in Lebanon or Syria,
and maybe Eddy would still be with us.
This is a simple thing.
We need to change discrimination in the law
and we need to give the right for a woman to pass her nationality on.
Today, we still have 25 countries
that will not let a woman pass her nationality on to her children.
We need states to identify stateless people -
this 10 million, it's an estimate -
and to facilitate their naturalization.
To make this happen, it's so simple:
by changing the law.
Because everyone has the right to belong.
And Brazil, they did it.
Today,
with this amazing, lovely Brazilian passport,
I'm proud to announce, today I'm Brazilian;
today I belong.
And everyone has the right to belong.
Thank you.
(Cheering) (Applause)
Wow. Thank you.
(Applause)