International Organization of Migration Belize to Assist with Amnesty Applications Online

The government has announced that it will officially open its amnesty portal in August for people who fled to Belize seeking freedom or safety. Working hand in hand with them is the International Organization for Migration’s local office. According to the head of that office, Diana Locke, there have been more than two thousand, seven hundred persons who have applied for amnesty in Belize. Most of them are women and the reason why majority would qualify is the fact that they have Belizean children.

Diana Locke

Diana Locke, Head of Office, I.O.M., Belize

“We have already completed ten mobile hubs across the country. We are now going this weekend to the final district that we have not reached and that is Dangriga. We’ve done Toledo two weeks ago and we’re going to go back again to Cayo because we didn’t feel that we saw enough people there. So, we will go back and that will be the end of those. We’re targeting some thirty-five hundred people at the end of this process. We’ve already seen two thousand, seven hundred up to the end of Toledo and so we will do that. We are looking at our resources to see if when the portal opens we would have sufficient resources and maybe we will have new partners that will join us with funding that we can go back out into the community to help the people that – we prepared the applications already. We will help them to actually do the registration online.”