Key threats of statelessness in the post-secession Sudanese and South Sudanese nationality regimes

Post print version deposited in accordance with SHERPA ROMEO guidelines. The definitive version is available at: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/22112596-01902023Following the secession of South Sudan from Sudan on 9 July 2011, both countries have passed new citizenship legislation with dramatic effects for the rights of individuals on both sides of the new border. While the South Sudanese nationality provisions appear generous, its regime is at once both over and under-inclusive. It grants citizenship to a broad range of persons with little connection to South Sudan but fails to guarantee citizenship for individuals habitually resident in South Sudan and children born in South Sudan to stateless, undocumented or foreign parents. The Sudanese Act provides for the automatic denationalisation of South Sudanese nationals only and reserves to its own authorities the discretion to determine whether South Sudanese nationality has been acquired. This will lead to de jure statelessness as individuals denationalised by operation of the Sudanese law struggle to establish their nationality claims in South Sudan. Those individuals who have acquired South Sudanese citizenship but remain in Sudan are left as de facto stateless in the continuing absence of effective state protection from South Sudan

Statelessness and mass expulsion in Sudan: a reassessment of the international law

types: ArticleThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights by an authorized administrator of Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons.Following the secession of South Sudan from Sudan on July 9, 2011, both South Sudan and Sudan have passed new citizenship laws with dramatic effects for the rights of individuals on both sides of the new border. While in Sudan this consists of a series of amendments to the 1994 Sudanese Nationality Act,the new South Sudan government has promulgated an entirely new Nationality Act. I have recently published an extended analysis of the resulting legal regime that describes its key features in some detail. This paper builds on that initial analysis through an examination of the key resulting protection threats for those South Sudanese remaining in Sudan and, in particular, resulting de jure and de facto statelessness and the threat of mass expulsion. As such, this article is intended to serve as something of a companion piece to my earlier paper. While that paper examined the operation of the post-secession nationality regime in detail, this article explains the resources available at public international law to address the key failures of that regime

The role of international law in defining the protection of refugees in India

This is the author's version of a work accepted for publication in Wisconsin International Law Review, 2015 Volume 33.India has not acceded to either the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. The admission and protection of refugees in India continues to be controlled by the 1946 Foreigners Act, which gives the state sweeping powers to detain and expel all foreigners in India. India is bound by a wide range of general human rights and customary norms that combine to produce a broad norm prohibiting forced return (refoulement). Yet, no provision is made in the domestic law of India to protect displaced persons from refoulement. Efforts to introduce a comprehensive refugee law that would provide for such protections have been consistently defeated following objections from the Indian security and intelligence agencies. In this paper, I consider the current position of India in light of its domestic legal regime, its membership of the UNHCR Executive Committee (ExCom), and the limitations it continues to impose as a matter of policy on UNHCR operations in the country. I describe the standards applied in the admission and protection of refugees in India, with a particular focus on Tibetan and Sri Lankan refugees. While Indian admission and protection policies have often been quite generous, they are also obviously unequal, with standards among refugee communities varying widely according to ethnicity, country of origin, and date of arrival. I explain the international standards that control in this matter and, in particular, argue that both the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Convention against Torture (CAT) each carry obligations of non-refoulement for India. This is in addition to the well-established obligations of non-refoulement imposed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Finally, I argue that the various norms relevant to the issue of non-refoulement in both the refugee law and human rights context, although superficially disparate, have now largely converged. As such, a standard rule can now be construed that forbids India from returning individuals to situations where there is a real risk of serious human rights violations. This norm is non-derogable and can be properly evaluated only with respect to the seriousness of any potential violation, and not the category of the rights concerned

The Syrian crisis and the principle of non-refoulement

This is an open access article, freely available from the International Law Studies website. Please cite the ILS published version available from https://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/cbabd384-d196-4d22-92fb-57defd22d97c/Th-Syrian-Crisis-and-the-Principle-of-Non-Refoulem.aspxAny discussion concerning refugees must begin with the right against forced return or non-refoulement found in the 1951 Refugee Geneva Convention. This article therefore first examines the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its application in the surrounding States of Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey (Section II). Particular attention is given to the new (2013) Turkish Law on Foreigners,which transposes many of the most important elements of the 1951 Refugee Convention into Turkish domestic law. The section then turns its focus to the so-called “nexus requirement” found in the 1951 Convention, examining the role this limitation might have in the Syrian context. The latter half of the article moves beyond the terms of the 1951 Convention to discuss parallel sources of protection, including prospects for a regional protection instrument (Section III), the principle of non-refoulement in general international human rights law (Section IV), customary international law (section V) and international humanitarian law (Section VI)

Testing a global city hypothesis : an assessment of polarization across US cities

Social polarization is perhaps most evident within the world's large cities where we can easily observe stark contrasts between wealth and poverty. A world city theoretical perspective has emerged that associates large cities importance in a global network of cities to the degree of internal polarization within these cities. The research reported here locates 57 large US cities within this world city hierarchy and then empirically examines the hypothesized positive association between global centrality and social polarization using a multivariate, cross-city analysis. The findings are mixed, with some evidence that global centrality increases income polarization, but only in the context of higher levels of immigration. There is no evidence that a city's centrality affects occupational polarization. We conclude by suggesting implications for the world city literature and future research

Evidence for frequent incest in a cooperatively breeding mammal.

As breeding between relatives often results in inbreeding depression, inbreeding avoidance is widespread in the animal kingdom. However, inbreeding avoidance may entail fitness costs. For example, dispersal away from relatives may reduce survival. How these conflicting selection pressures are resolved is challenging to investigate, but theoretical models predict that inbreeding should occur frequently in some systems. Despite this, few studies have found evidence of regular incest in mammals, even in social species where relatives are spatio-temporally clustered and opportunities for inbreeding frequently arise. We used genetic parentage assignments together with relatedness data to quantify inbreeding rates in a wild population of banded mongooses, a cooperatively breeding carnivore. We show that females regularly conceive to close relatives, including fathers and brothers. We suggest that the costs of inbreeding avoidance may sometimes outweigh the benefits, even in cooperatively breeding species where strong within-group incest avoidance is considered to be the norm

Avoiding Chaos in Wonderland

Wonderland, a compact, integrated economic, demographic and environmental model is investigated using methods developed for studying critical phenomena. Simulation results show the parameter space separates into two phases, one of which contains the property of long term, sustainable development. By employing information contain in the phase diagram, an optimal strategy involving pollution taxes is developed as a means of moving a system initially in a unsustainable region of the phase diagram into a region of sustainability while ensuring minimal regret with respect to long term economic growth.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures. Submitted to Physica

Reconciling observed and simulated stellar halo masses

We use cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of Milky-Way-mass galaxies from the FIRE project to evaluate various strategies for estimating the mass of a galaxy's stellar halo from deep, integrated-light images. We find good agreement with integrated-light observations if we mimic observational methods to measure the mass of the stellar halo by selecting regions of an image via projected radius relative to the disk scale length or by their surface density in stellar mass . However, these observational methods systematically underestimate the accreted stellar component, defined in our (and most) simulations as the mass of stars formed outside of the host galaxy, by up to a factor of ten, since the accreted component is centrally concentrated and therefore substantially obscured by the galactic disk. Furthermore, these observational methods introduce spurious dependencies of the estimated accreted stellar component on the stellar mass and size of galaxies that can obscure the trends in accreted stellar mass predicted by cosmological simulations, since we find that in our simulations the size and shape of the central galaxy is not strongly correlated with the assembly history of the accreted stellar halo. This effect persists whether galaxies are viewed edge-on or face-on. We show that metallicity or color information may provide a way to more cleanly delineate in observations the regions dominated by accreted stars. Absent additional data, we caution that estimates of the mass of the accreted stellar component from single-band images alone should be taken as lower limits.Comment: Version accepted by Ap

Reproductive competition triggers mass eviction in cooperative banded mongooses

In many vertebrate societies, forced eviction of group members is an important determinant of population structure, but little is known about what triggers eviction. Three main explanations are (1) the reproductive competition hypothesis; (2) the coercion of cooperation hypothesis; and (3) the adaptive forced dispersal hypothesis. The last hypothesis proposes that dominant individuals use eviction as an adaptive strategy to propagate copies of their alleles through a highly structured population. We tested these hypotheses as explanations for eviction in cooperatively breeding banded mongooses (Mungos mungo), using a 16-year dataset on life history, behaviour and relatedness. In this species, groups of females, or mixed-sex groups, are periodically evicted en masse. Our evidence suggests that reproductive competition is the main ultimate trigger for eviction for both sexes. We find little evidence that mass eviction is used to coerce helping, or as a mechanism to force dispersal of relatives into the population. Eviction of females changes the landscape of reproductive competition for remaining males, which may explain why males are evicted alongside females. Our results show that the consequences of resolving within-group conflict resonate through groups and populations to affect population structure, with important implications for social evolution