Estonia welcomes new minor citizens
Estonia took another step towards eliminating the problem of statelessness and/or absence of Estonian citizenship among children – descendants of Soviet settlers. How much further can the rules be simplified?
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Birthright citizenship and children born in a conflict zone
Because of an amendment to the Danish citizenship act, children born to a Danish parent who has unlawfully entered or stays in a ‘conflict zone’ will not acquire Danish citizenship by birth. What are potential risks of statelessness?
Neither here nor there: Residency as a condition for naturalisation
In Irish immigration law, the conditions for becoming a citizen through the process of naturalisation demand that the immigrant acquires a reckonable residence of five out of nine years in the State. However, the determination of this residence period poses a problem in establishing which legal concept of residence is required. Legal terminology on residency can be found in different areas of law. You will find ‘lawful residency’ in immigration law, and ‘actual residency’ in taxation law, ‘normal residency’ and ‘habitual residency’ are both found in succession law and family law: but what of ‘continuous residence’?
At last, a law on expatriate vote in Greece
Greece has joined the growing group of states that have extended the right to vote in national elections to their citizens abroad. Although the rhetorics – and to a certain extend the expectations – of the Greek government were far more generous in terms of expanding the vote to a broader expatriate electorate, the law provides for a considerable number of restrictions aiming at guaranteeing that the persons entitled to vote conserve genuine links with the country.
Statelessness Index: a new online tool assessing how countries in Europe deal with statelessness
The Statelessness Index is an online tool that provides extensive country by country analysis of law, policy and practice, which has been benchmarked against international norms and good practice and then assessed using five categories, ranging from the most positive to the most negative. It allows users to quickly understand which areas of law, policy and practice can be improved by states and which can be looked to as examples of good practice in addressing statelessness.
Paths to Citizenship, Paths to Statelessness
The National Registry of Citizens (NRC) provides paths to statelessness for groups that are not preferred, by ostensibly sorting nationals from non-nationals, but in effect doing this on the basis of religion. This is why, though the idea of the NRC itself is not new, what its current avatar does to the legal and constitutional idea of citizenship is new. It seeks to identify those that cannot prove their ancestry in India and, in the first instance, disenfranchise, but in the longer run possibly deport or confine them in detention centres.
The National Registry of Citizens: Violating Muslims, Violating Humanity in Assam
The National Registry of Citizens (NRC) is a platform for divisive parochial politics, an anti-human project that reduces people into statistics and numbers. In India, the British colonials had introduced the census of people beginning from 1872. The effort was to categorise and box the colonial subjects within classificatory schemes of religions, castes, tribes, and so on. This was very confusing to the people of India. The current NRC is a further regression into undermining humanity. The individual human person disappears into an abstract NRC number and is recognisable only if she/he has that mark. It is such an unusual exchange, yet it reassures the people that this is what they want.
India’s National Register of Citizens: Fine intentions, Ominous portents
The border state of Assam in Northeastern India has had a long history of migration from the neighbouring region that is now Bangladesh. This migration began well before the partition of India in 1947, when the international border between eastern Bengal (which became East Pakistan and subsequently Bangladesh) and India came into existence. Since the 1970s, a decade that began with Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan, the phenomenon of ‘suffraged non-citizens’ has been the cause of intense political controversy in Assam. Yet the legacy of the 1947 partition makes this issue more than just a matter of undocumented cross-border migration.
EU27 citizens must keep their voting rights in local government elections
The Withdrawal Agreement does not guarantee the maintenance of existing local government electoral rights for those covered by its remit, let alone suggest a framework for such rights to accrue for other EU27 citizens and UK citizens were the UK to leave the EU. This, in turn, has led the government to reach agreements with Spain, Portugal and Luxembourg on preserving reciprocal voting rights in local government elections.
‘Jihadi Jack’ and the folly of revoking citizenship
Imagine this scenario: Jack Letts, ISIS foreign fighter, is a citizen of the U.K. and of Canada. Neither country wants to claim him. Each has the possibility of revoking his citizenship as long as Letts is not rendered stateless. The result is an arbitrary race to see which country could strip his citizenship first. To the loser goes the citizen — maybe Canada, maybe the U.K.