NICOSIA – The teachers’ union representing Turkish Cypriots living in the occupied territory said the legitimate Cypriot government will not issue identity cards to children whose parents are Turkish.
Shener Elcil, head of the KTOS union, met with ombudsman Maria Stylianou Lottides to discuss the state’s refusal to grant the cards and bar them from citizenship even if one of their parents is a Cypriot citizen.
Elcil said the refusal was a violation of the Constitution and that since Turkey’s illegal invasion in 1974, some 17,000 mixed marriages had taken place in the north, the Cyprus Mail reported.
According to Elcil, state services have not even recently accepted applications filed by children of mixed marriages seeking citizenship, rejecting them without examination.
There are thousands of children with one Turkish Cypriot parent and the other from a non-EU country, Elcil said, whose applications for ID cards and passports are pending. , claiming that children were being held hostage by politics and said their rights were being violated.
Talks to reunify the island have gone nowhere for more than four decades and the latest round of negotiations between Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci collapsed in July in the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana after Turkey refused to withdraw its army and demanded the right to invade further whenever it wanted.
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Source: thenationalherald.com
