As of 2025. More than 113,000 refugees were resettled to third countries, above all the United States, between 2007 and 2016; UNHCR now counts a small remaining caseload in the Beldangi and Sanischare camps within a total Nepali refugee population of about 20,000, and neither return to Bhutan nor Nepali citizenship has been offered.
Following Bhutan's "one nation, one people" policies and the 1985 Citizenship Act, which required documentary proof of residence in 1958, more than 100,000 Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa from southern Bhutan lost their citizenship or left the country between 1988 and 1993, most travelling through India to eastern Nepal. Nepal admitted them into seven camps administered by UNHCR but did not permit local integration: residents faced restricted or controlled movement, restricted ability to work and limited access to the local justice system, and remained without any nationality for close to two decades while more than fifteen rounds of bilateral talks between Nepal and Bhutan produced no agreed repatriation. Bhutan classified many of those who left as voluntary emigrants and treated the associated political parties as anti-national, and declined to guarantee full citizenship and rights to returnees; property left behind was in many cases reallocated. From 2007 a group of resettlement countries led by the United States, with Canada, Australia, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, began large-scale third-country resettlement, and by 2019 about 112,800 people had left. Those remaining, consolidated into two camps, are disproportionately elderly and separated from resettled relatives, and no repatriation to Bhutan has taken place.
Nepal hosting Lhotshampa expelled from Bhutan in UNHCR-administered camps without local integration, while Bhutan declined to accept their return
The figure is contested. Bhutan's 1988 census, whose reclassification of residents triggered the expulsions, is not published in a form that settles it; refugee organisations and outside observers put the Lhotshampa at roughly a third to 45 per cent of a Bhutanese population of about 600,000, that is 150,000-250,000, while the Bhutanese government maintains that many of those expelled were recent illegal immigrants rather than citizens. About 107,000 people were registered in the UNHCR camps in eastern Nepal in the 1990s.
Both fields are null because the confinement in UNHCR-administered camps in eastern Nepal has not produced a death toll; the camps held over 107,000 people at peak, about 112,800 were resettled to third countries from 2007 (roughly 85% to the United States) and around 10,000 remain, mostly elderly, with reported rising rates of depression and suicide that no body has quantified. Some sources report more than 300 people killed during the Bhutanese crackdown of the early 1990s, but that occurred in Bhutan rather than in the camps.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UNHCR documented that Bhutan's 1985 Citizenship Act and 1988 census reclassified Lhotshampa as non-nationals — splitting members of the same family into different categories where pre-1958 residence could not be proved — leaving over 100,000 people stateless and unable to return.
Nepal