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Cabinet minister’s birthplace debacle not resolved a year after revelations

Click to play video: 'Maryam Monsef: A ‘range of emotions’ after discovering via newspaper true birthplace was Iran'
Maryam Monsef: A ‘range of emotions’ after discovering via newspaper true birthplace was Iran
Federal cabinet minister Maryam Monsef says she has experienced “a range of emotions” since discovering earlier this week that she was not born in Afghanistan, as she has always believed, but in Iran – Sep 22, 2016

A federal cabinet minister remains wrapped in red tape a year after she revealed she was born in Iran rather than Afghanistan as she had previously believed.

Maryam Monsef says she is still waiting for her government to update her documents.

Monsef was hailed by the governing Liberals as the first Afghan-born MP, but reports emerged that she was actually born in Mashhad, Iran, a city about 200 kilometres away from the Afghan border.

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Monsef says her parents fled Afghanistan when she was a child but her mother never thought the issue of her birthplace mattered because both parents were Afghan citizens and under Iranian law she would have also been considered an Afghan citizen.

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When the flap over her birthplace emerged, Monsef promised she would take steps to fix the error on her citizenship papers.

She says she has submitted documentation to immigration and citizenship officials and is still waiting for a resolution.

The Immigration Department would not comment specifically on her case.

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