Survey on Rules on Loss of Nationality in International Treaties and Case Law. CEPS Paper in Liberty and Security in Europe No. 57, 30 August 2013

This paper offers a picture of the obligations existing under international and European law in respect of the loss of nationality. It describes international instruments including obligations in this field with direct relevancy for the loss of nationality of Member States of the European Union, but also obligations regarding loss of nationality in regional non-European treaties. Attention is given to two important judicial decisions of the European Court of Justice (Janko Rottmann) and the European Court of Human Rights (Genovese v Malta) regarding nationality. Special attention is devoted to Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which forbids the arbitrary deprivation of nationality. A survey is provided of possible sub-principles that can be derived from this rule. Finally, some observations are made on the burden of proof in cases of loss of nationality

On the threshold of statelessness: Palestinian narratives of loss and erasure

This article examines how Palestinians in France, Sweden and the UK negotiate, mobilise and/or resist, and ultimately problematise, notions of statelessness as a concept and as a marker of identity. Centralising Palestinians’ conceptualisations in this manner – including accounts which directly challenge academics’ and policy-makers’ definitions of the problem of, and solution to, statelessness - is particularly important given that statelessness emerges as both a condition and a label which erase the ability to speak, and be heard. The article draws on the narratives of 46 Palestinians to examine perceptions of statelessness as a marker of rightlessess, home(land)lessness and voicelessness. It then explores statelessness through the paradigm of the ‘threshold’, reflecting both on interviewees’ ambiguity towards this label, status and condition, and the extent to which even Palestinians who hold citizenship remain ‘on the threshold of statelessness’. It concludes by reflecting on interviewees’ rejection of a label which is imposed upon them ‘from a distance’ via bureaucratic processes which reproduce, rather than redress, processes of erasure and dispossession

Citizenship deprivation

Most critical analyses assess citizenship-deprivation policies against international human rights and domestic rule of law standards, such as prevention of statelessness, non-arbitrariness with regard to justifications and judicial remedies, or non-discrimination between different categories of citizens. This report considers instead from a political theory perspective how deprivation policies reflect specific conceptions of political community. We distinguish four normative conceptions of the grounds of membership in a political community that apply to decisions on acquisition and loss of citizenship status: i) a ‘State discretion’ view, according to which governments should be as free as possible in pursuing State interests when determining citizenship status; ii) an ‘individual choice’ view, according to which individuals should be as free as possible in choosing their citizenship status; iii) an ‘ascriptive community’ view, according to which both State and individual choices should be minimised through automatic determination of membership based on objective criteria such as the circumstances of birth; and iv) a ‘genuine link’ view, according to which the ties of individuals to particular States determine their claims to inclusion and against deprivation while providing at the same time objections against including individuals without genuine links. We argue that most citizenship laws combine these four normative views in different ways, but that from a democratic perspective the ‘genuine link’ view is normatively preferable to the others. The report subsequently examines five general grounds for citizenship withdrawal – threats to public security, non-compliance with citizenship duties, flawed acquisition, derivative loss and loss of genuine links – and considers how the four normative views apply to withdrawal provision motivated by these concerns. The final section of the report examines whether EU citizenship provides additional reasons for protection against Member States’ powers of citizenship deprivation. We suggest that, in addition to fundamental rights protection through EU law and protection of free movement rights, three further arguments could be invoked: toleration of dual citizenship in a political union, prevention of unequal conditions for loss among EU citizens, and the salience of genuine links to the EU itself rather than merely to one of its Member States

Executive Order 13492: Legal Borderlands

On January 22, 2009, newly inaugurated President Barack Obama implemented Executive Order 13492. The order refers to the legal disposition of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and the termination of the detention center. The Executive Order lists five possible options to close Guantánamo Bay and to otherwise try and place current prisoners elsewhere: prosecution under military law, prosecution under federal law, permanent detainment, deportation and release. Still, Guantánamo Bay remains open. Guantánamo detainees exist in a legal limbo without formal charges and trial. Executive Order 13492 was created to place them elsewhere and close the detention center

Romani Minorities and Uneven Citizenship Access in the Post-Yugoslav Space

This paper discusses the position of Romani minorities in the light of the state dissolution and further citizenship regime transformations after the disintegration of the former Socialist Yugoslavia. While observing closely the repositioning of the Romani minorities in the post-Yugoslav space, it explicates that in the case of state dissolution, the unevenness of citizenship does not only manifest in the rights dimension, but also in uneven access to citizenship with regard to new polities.status: publishe

Il fenomeno dell’apolide

This paper examines the phenomenon of stateless persons, including the definition of what it means to be stateless and two types of statelessness, de jure and de facto. Although statelessness is internationally recognized, by both the U.N. and individual countries, little is actually done for those populations and groups that hang in such an ambiguous state. Often times the root problems, such as statelessness through birth or government actions, are not addressed, and the groups face much discrimination

Analyzing Consistency of Behavioral REST Web Service Interfaces

REST web services can offer complex operations that do more than just simply creating, retrieving, updating and deleting information from a database. We have proposed an approach to design the interfaces of behavioral REST web services by defining a resource and a behavioral model using UML. In this paper we discuss the consistency between the resource and behavioral models that represent service states using state invariants. The state invariants are defined as predicates over resources and describe what are the valid state configurations of a behavioral model. If a state invariant is unsatisfiable then there is no valid state configuration containing the state and there is no service that can implement the service interface. We also show how we can use reasoning tools to determine the consistency between these design models.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2012, arXiv:1210.578