The right to have rights: benchmarking statelessness protection

Research Theme: Citizenship and Immigrant Integration

The right to have rights: benchmarking statelessness protection

The problems related to statelessness are grounded in a constellation of complex issues such as birth registration, nationality legislation, state succession, migration and international law. Considering that national laws also govern who is allowed to legally reside in a country, people who are not citizens anywhere run the risk of not being permitted to live anywhere either. Furthermore, stateless people’s rights to enter, leave, work or vote in a country may all be suspended. This project aims to build on existing collaboration with UNHCR and earlier comparative work. The objective is to set up a global database containing information about the extent to which national citizenship laws provide sufficient protection against statelessness, based on the relevant international legal standards, such as those of the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. This database will provide a unique reference point to benchmark national policies, as well as for analysis of the causes and consequences of cross-national differences.

Project leaders: Gerard-René de Groot (Faculty of Law), Maarten Vink (Faculty of Arts and Social Science). Other UM participants: Costica Dumbrava (Faculty of Arts and Social Science), Katja Swieder (Faculty of Law and University of Amsterdam), Olivier Vonk (Faculty of Law). Societal partners: UNHCR (Statelessness Unit); EUDO CITIZENSHIP; Open Society Foundation.