The Risk of Statelessness: Reasserting a Rule for the Protection of the Right to Nationality

A global effort to combat statelessness and defend the universal right tonationality is currently underway. Nevertheless, questions persist about the proper scope of the right to nationality, the appropriate form of statelessness protection, and the legal limits of state discretion to deny or deprive an individual of nationality. These questions have animated a heated transnational debate about statelessness in Hispaniola, where the government of the Dominican Republic has designed a legal system that excludes persons of Haitian descent from Dominican nationality. Central to this conflict is a question about whether actions by the Dominican state leave persons of Haitian descent stateless -without nationality anywhere in the world

Life after Limbo: Stateless Persons in the United States and the Role of International Protection in Achieving a Legal Solution

Stateless persons are not recognized as citizens by any country, and as such, their enjoyment of fundamental human rights depends on the good faith of host countries, and their basic human security and dignity are often subject to the whims of immigration authorities. Despite this intense level of vulnerability, U.S. immigration law does not explicitly recognize statelessness, nor does it provide for humanitarian protection to relieve stateless persons of their suffering. Rather, stateless persons are treated like any other unauthorized migrants in the United States; when they are ordered removed, they are mandatorily detained while immigration officials undertake efforts to execute those orders. Such removal efforts are futile in the case of stateless persons, and when they are ultimately released from detention, they are cast into a legal limbo in which they spend the rest of their lives on immigration parole, uncertain as to what their future may hold. This article argues that it is imperative to establish a protection mechanism for stateless persons in the United States, and critically analyzes a proposal by the U.S. Senate to establish a mechanism for the protection of stateless persons under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as part of its 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (SB 744). This article relies on the international law of statelessness as a benchmark for this critique, and argues that that the proposed mechanism may fail to meaningfully address the statelessness problem in the United States if it is not tethered to the international protection framework

The Right to Migrate: A Human Rights Response to Immigration Restrictionism in Argentina

Within days of President Donald Trump’s 2017 Executive Orders on border security and immigration enforcement, President Mauricio Macri of Argentina issued a Decree to address what he declared was an urgent problem of immigrant criminality. The timing of the two Presidents’ actions triggered concerns that U.S.-style restrictionist immigration regulation was spreading to South America, a continent that has taken progressive steps towards recognizing the human rights of migrants in recent years. Until Macri’s 2017 Decree, Argentina was considered a leader in this regard, with its 2004 immigration law that boldly codified a “right to migrate” and included robust substantive and procedural protections for immigrants. While the Decree marked the end of an era of progressive immigration policy in Argentina, the persistence of international human rights protections for migrants could provide the means to uphold key aspects of the right to migrate. This Article tracks jurisprudential developments under the 2004 law, and then demonstrates how the 2017 Decree undermined many of the advances achieved under the prior legislative framework. The Article also provides an overview of current litigation to defend the immigrant bill of rights and key procedural and judicial protections. The Article argues that the application of international human rights law on migration could fend off some of the more pernicious features of the 2017 Decree in Argentina. The Article concludes that the right to migrate in Argentina has been weakened, but that its essence will persist if the Argentine judiciary reinforces human rights protections for migrants

Fifty States, but No Room for the Stateless, in Atlas of the Stateless: Facts and Figures about Exclusion and Displacement (Ulrike Lauerhass et al. eds, 2020)

“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...” says a plaque on the Statue of Liberty in New York. Since its founding, the United States has welcomed immigrants and has granted them citizenship. Their children born on American soil automatically become US nationals. The current US administration is trying to overturn this proud tradition.https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/fac_books/1165/thumbnail.jp

The Arrival of Statelessness Studies ?

In this symposium contribution, the author provides a view that the study of statelessness has emerged as a multi-disciplinary field and urge that we institutionalize it as such. Statelessness is fundamentally a legal concept. The definition of ‘stateless person’ specifically refers to the operation of law, and the protections envisioned by both the 1954 and 1961 Conventions afforded to stateless persons are legal in nature. At the same time, formal legal reasoning has proven inadequate to fully understand statelessness and protect stateless persons. Moreover, factual statelessness enjoys few legal protections, but is essential to a more robust understanding of nationality and what its absence really means. Accordingly, the study of this legal concept should happen across disciplines to ensure that we take appropriate steps to integrate effectively stateless persons legally, politically, and socially, in the communities where they live

From Judgment to Justice: Implementing International and Regional Human Rights Decisions

Examines the European, Inter-American, and African human rights systems and United Nations treaty bodies; how well court decisions are implemented; and what monitoring mechanisms exist. Suggests ways to strengthen implementation and, in turn, legitimacy

Balancing Indigenous Rights and a State\u27s Right to Develop in Latin America: The Inter-American Rights Regime and ILO Convention 169

Latin America is a unique continent in many respects. Its vicious colonial history, characterized by the enslavement of indigenous peoples and the extraction of limitless wealth by occupying powers, left modern society to cope with a legacy of oppression. However, many critics believe that post-colonial marginalization of Native Latin Americans is largely equivalent to the oppression attributed to the colonial architects. Much of this abuse has occurred in the name of development: expansive industrialization projects that overtake indigenous lands and decimate cultures. However, in Latin America, which is a patchwork of nations plagued by large populations of rural and urban poor, development is both a right and a responsibility of all national governments

Balancing Indigenous Rights and a State\u27s Right to Develop in Latin America: The Inter-American Rights Regime and ILO Convention 169

Latin America is a unique continent in many respects. Its vicious colonial history, characterized by the enslavement of indigenous peoples and the extraction of limitless wealth by occupying powers, left modern society to cope with a legacy of oppression. However, many critics believe that post-colonial marginalization of Native Latin Americans is largely equivalent to the oppression attributed to the colonial architects. Much of this abuse has occurred in the name of development: expansive industrialization projects that overtake indigenous lands and decimate cultures. However, in Latin America, which is a patchwork of nations plagued by large populations of rural and urban poor, development is both a right and a responsibility of all national governments