NEWS RELEASE
March 17, 1993 World Service Authority Celebrates 40th Year of Providing
Global Human Rights Documents
Washington, D.C.-March 1994 marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the
Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit World Service Authority, which, since 1954, has
registered over one-million world citizens and issued hundreds of thousands of World
Passports and other global identity documents based on the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.
Founded in New York in 1954 in response to the global swell of interest in world
citizenship that began when former WW II bomber pilot Garry Davis renounced his U.S.
citizenship in protest over "warring nationalistic policies," and declared
himself a world citizen, the WSA maintains a database of individuals worldwide who choose
to identify themselves as "world citizens," and offers World Passports, World
Birth Certificates, World Identity Cards, and World Marriage Licenses to anyone who
applies for them. Ingrid von Teslon-Dennison, WSA president, said that the organization
issued 32,719 documents last year to world citizens, stateless people and refugees.
"Besides being a statement that the bearer recognizes a planetary community as a
dynamic fact," says Ms. Dennison, "these passports are concrete tools for the
exercise of our fundamental human rights." Citing Article 13(2) of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, "Everyone has the right to leave any county, including
his own, and to return to his country," she adds that national passports, a means by
which governments limit the travel of those within their borders, condone the violation of
human rights. World Service Authority documents, she maintains, are oftentimes the only
ones available to refugees and stateless persons, who otherwise are literally imprisoned
in nations by the lack of identity papers.
The World Passport has been accepted on a de facto basis by over 130 countries, and
testimonials to its effectiveness pour into the World Service Authority's headquarters
almost daily. "To me," wrote a Black Christian refugee from south Sudan last
month, "WSA documents were the only life saver. I will have been another memory, like
thousands of my people who have disappeared with unmarked graves, were it not for the WSA
World Identity Card.
Garry Davis, founder of the World Service Authority and head of its parent
organization, the World Government of World Citizens, has carried only a World Passport
since 1949, and has perhaps traveled farther on his World Service Authority Passport than
any other world citizen. "We live in a global era," he said from his Burlington,
Vermont office. "Every facet of our daily lives reflects the interconnectedness of
the world community. Yet our political system is stuck in the 18th century. Our problems
no longer stop at national borders, and neither can the solutions.
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