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Nansen Passport (Cover)

Nansen passports were internationally recognized identity cards first issued by the League of Nations to stateless refugees. Designed in 1922 by Fridtjof Nansen, in 1942 they were honored by governments in 52 countries and were the first refugee travel documents. Approximately 450,000 Nansen passports were issued, helping hundreds of thousands of stateless people to immigrate to a country that would have them. The Nansen International Office for Refugees was awarded the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to establish the Nansen passports.

The Nansen passport was developed after the Russian Revolution, when 1.4 million Russians moved out of Russia due to ideological conflicts with the communist government.^{[citation needed]} Hundreds of thousands of them stayed permanently abroad. It proved to be a great success, one of the few that could be attributed to the League of Nations.

While Nansen passports are no longer issued, present national authorities, including the United Nations, issue documents for stateless people and refugees. These include: Certificate of Identity (or Alien's Passport), Travel Document (also known as a "Refugee Travel Document") and Laissez-Passer.

The World Service Authority, a non-profit organization that promotes "world citizenship", issues a "World Passport" (purportedly under the authority of Article 13, Section 1, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) which has been accepted on a case-by-case basis. The organization claims on their website that (as of October 2006) six countries have recognized the World Passport on an official basis: Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Mauritania, Tanzania, Togo and Zambia. [1] However, Burkina Faso withdrew its de jure recognition of World Passports in 1992, and there is evidence going back to 1996 that Zambia has also withdrawn its recognition.

The idea of a refugee passport was renewed between 1998 and 2002 by the Republic of Lomar Foundation but discontinued in the wake of the post 9/11 constraint on such documents.

In Vladimir Nabokov's book Pnin, the narrator refers to it: "... that miserable thing, the Nansen Passport (a kind of parolee's card issued to Russian émigrés), ...".

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