Friday, May 11, 1984

WORLD CITIZEN GARRY DAVIS CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO SOVEREIGN STATES

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, -- Northwest Orient Flight 008 from Tokyo to Seattle, Saturday, May 5, 1984 carried a non-paying "passenger" identified only by a World Passport which the Japanese Government refused to honor even after two appeals to the Minister of Justice, Eisaku Sumi (See attached release).

Today, that same person, World Citizen Garry Davis, is being detained by Northwest Orient at the Hyatt-Regency Hotel near the Sea-Tac Airport under 24-hour guard while U.S. Immigration ponders how to "handle" him.

INS's dilemma is that Davis doesn't want to come into the United States at this time but furthermore that he has been considered by the INS since May, 1977 as an "excludable alien" and thus not permitted to enter the United States, incidentally the country of his birth, at all. The other half of the dilemma is that, since Davis renounced his nationality in 1948 in Paris and declared himself a "citizen of the world," and thus became stateless, he is literally undeportable once "in" the United States.

A total of seven court decisions, from May 17, 1977 to January 17, 1982, including that of the Supreme Court, have confirmed the INS's claim of Davis' excludable status. Yet, ironically, Davis makes his permanent home in Washington, D.C. where the offices of the World Service Authority, the agency which actually issues the World Passport, are located.

Thus Davis claims that while he physically left Washington, D.C. for Tokyo via Northwest Orient on Saturday, April 28, he never legally left the United States because he had not been legally admitted.

Seattle immigration officials claim to be waiting for Davis' file from Washington, D.C. before they can have a hearing while Davis claims that an immigration hearing is "irrelevant and redundant" at this time because he is not seeking to enter the United States in any case and only wants to be put back on a plane for Tokyo.

"I am caught once again in the literal anarchy between nation-states," Davis said from his hotel room, "where a man is tossed about like a sack of wheat and his human rights totally denied. Neither state recognizes the validity of the World Passport while at the same time both states are members of the United Nations, therefore obliged by the terms of its Charter to respect and observe fundamental human rights. We are witnessing once again, in my present situation, the total impotence of the state to cope with a single individual exercising his fundamental right to travel on his home planet. The World Passport represents a legitimate world community and a legitimate humanity residing therein whereas both Japan and the United States represent an obsolete nation-state system fast-moving us all toward nuclear holocaust. I ask all those who claim or advocate a world citizenship along with their local allegiances to support my and their own right to freedom of travel by obtaining and using a World Passport issued by the World Service Authority, the world peoples'' city hall' in Washington, D.C."

Davis, now 62, announced his candidacy for president of the World Government of World Citizens on September 4, 1983 with a program of "world peace though law" (see attached release), World Ballots have been printed and are being issued by the World Election Board, an administrative affiliate of the World Government of World Citizens.

"World elections are long overdue," Candidate Davis said. "Article twenty-one of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mandates them: 'The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government....' We, the people who will either die in World War III or survive as a whole people, cannot wait for national leaders to provoke that very war. We must act now before it is too late. We must elect our own representatives on the global level who then will have the sovereign mandate to outlaw war itself between nations. That is the issue, not nuclear freeze or decreasing armament budgets or eliminating particular weapons or even verification between equally sovereign states. There is no such thing as national security in an anarchic world. The meaning of 'nuclear' is total. The price of world peace is nationalism. We will all perish together or survive together. It is that simple. Only if we stop thinking nationalistically or in we-and-they terms and recognize humanity as one and each human a part of that whole can we save our home planet and our world community from disaster.

The address of the World Service Authority is 1012 14th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20005. The issuing fee for the World Passport is $40 for a 10-year validity and $25 for a 3-year validity. It is a 40-page document in 7 languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Esperanto, with a complete medical certificate in the inside back cover. It has been recognized by over 80 nations on a case-by-case basis and by five nations legally. Over 250,000 World Passports are presently in circulation.