Abstract
AbstractHaving recently emerged from its unenviable status as the runt of international law, the phenomenon of statelessness nonetheless eludes traditional international legal instruments. Confronted with questions of nationality that typically fall within the domain of sovereignty, international and regional human rights bodies struggle to rein in the increasingly creative measures that states adopt to obscure the production and persistence of statelessness. This Article uncovers and dissects the different ways in which states manufacture statelessness not through explicitly discriminatory laws and unequal treatment, but through manipulating ostensibly neutral criteria for nationality. The Article identifies three such criteria that are not traditionally considered “suspect” categories for the grant or denial of nationality: time, territory, and administrative practice. It also suggests doctrinal, policy, and strategic tools for identifying and responding to the types of statelessness that are not a collateral consequence of state failure or incompetence, but the outcome of state intentionality.
Highlights
The time is the 1920s, after the “Great War of Freedom.” Gerard Gales, an American seaman and the fictional protagonist of B
By creating a class of people who were “„gatecrashers‟ in the backyards of others”, statelessness posed challenges for states who were their unwilling recipients and prevented from controlling the boundaries of their membership.[27]. Seen from this angle, statelessness was “an unfortunate consequence of public international law‟s errors, rather than a phenomenon with its own weight.”[28]. While the inter-war period saw increased international attention to statelessness as a problem in its own right, as the subsequent section shows, the plight of stateless persons came to be overshadowed by the more pressing need to respond to another category of dispossessed persons: refugees
While state sovereignty over nationality matters continues to pose a challenge for the international regulation of statelessness, in the past few decades, two developments in international law jurisprudence and scholarship have made incursions into this sovereign space: the first seeks to close the gap between rights accorded to nationals and non-nationals while the second emphasizes the limits set by international law to state control over nationality
Summary
The time is the 1920s, after the “Great War of Freedom.” Gerard Gales, an American seaman and the fictional protagonist of B. This Article aims to draw the attention of international legal actors to the ways in which states practice discrimination in disguise to manufacture statelessness under the shadow of the law and to counter efforts at its legitimation In doing so, this Article tackles head-on the question posed by the ambitious 2014 #IBelong Campaign on statelessness by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): what would it take to end statelessness?7 The UNHCR has called statelessness an “ resolvable and preventable issue”[8] and drawn a ten-point action plan to identify and resolve existing situations of statelessness and prevent future ones from occurring.[9]. It took continued political turmoil in the form of state dissolutions, state successions, armed conflicts, and boundary disputes, for the international legal community to begin to recognize the stateless as a distinct category in need of international––and not merely domestic––protection
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