Statelessness in the Caribbean. Kristy A. Belton
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protection than permanent residents who are found inadmissible on grounds of misrepresentation” (2014, 7; italics added). CARL adds that “The result of this law is to remove citizenship and render the person a foreign national” (8; italics added). It is then up to the person concerned to prove she or he is not a citizen of another country in order to avoid statelessness (8).
In 2015, the Australian Parliament passed a similar act to Canada’s Bill C-24. The Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Act (No. 166) declares that a dual national who “acts inconsistently with their allegiance to Australia by engaging in conduct” related to terrorism or foreign recruitment effectively “renounces” her or his Australian citizenship (Parliament of Australia 2015, Section 33AA, para. 1). This provision not only applies to naturalized Australians, but also to those dual nationals who became Australian citizens at birth (para. 8).
According to the act, the minister in charge of denationalization or denaturalization of the Australian dual national does not have to give notification of said person’s citizenship deprivation if the minister “is satisfied that giving the notice could prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia, or Australian law enforcement operations” (para. 12). Furthermore, it is at the minister’s discretion or “determination” to decide whether to exempt a person under the act’s effects (para. 14) through consideration of “the person’s connection to the other country of which the person is a national or citizen and the availability of the rights of citizenship of that country to the person” (para. 17f). A person could, therefore, be potentially rendered stateless should the minister choose not to exercise his or her power under paragraph 14.21
While not a case of denaturalization or citizenship deprivation, the state of Texas in the United States has recently been the site of a practice that is almost tantamount to citizenship denial. For several years the Texas Department of State Health Services refused to provide birth certificates to children who were born to undocumented parents in its territory. This affected hundreds of children, primarily of Mexican descent or whose parents were from Central America (Hennessy-Fiske 2016). The result was the creation of Americans “without the papers to prove it” (Blitzer 2015 n. pag.) with repercussions that ran the gamut of being unable to re-enter the United States and problems enrolling children in school and receiving healthcare (2015 n. pag.; and Hennessy-Fiske 2015).22
The affected families sued Texas in federal court and reached a settlement with the Texas Department of State Health Services wherein the latter agreed to accept an expanded list of documents as proof of the immigrant parent’s identity (for example, foreign voter cards, U.S. utility bills and residential leases, or library cards). Juanita Valdez-Cox, executive director of La Unión del Pueblo Entero in Texas, called the settlement “a critical victory for immigrant families, but it is also a victory for the constitutional rights of all of us.… Questioning the citizenship of U.S.-born, citizen children of immigrant parents erodes our constitutional freedoms and protections, causes instability for parents and children, and undermines the guarantee that all of our children will unquestionably be citizens” (cited in Hennessy-Fiske 2016 n. pag.).
These are but a few examples that illustrate the tenuous nature of formal belonging in developed democracies, even for those who are so-called “birthright” citizens (that is, they acquired citizenship at birth through the authorized channels). What makes the cases of denationalization and denaturalization especially troublesome in the Canadian and Australian examples—as opposed to the blatant document denial in the Texas case—is the surreptitious way in which the process may be carried out while the citizens concerned are overseas (thereby preventing their reentry and greatly hindering their ability to pursue legal recourse).
While states have come a long way in reducing gender bias in laws related to property and nationality rights compared to one hundred years ago, statelessness still results from outright gender discrimination. For instance, twenty-seven states prevent their female citizens from passing on their citizenship to their children the same way their male counterparts do: The Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Brunei, Burundi, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kiribati, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mauritania, Nepal, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Togo, United Arab Emirates (Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights 2016).23
In many of these countries, a citizen woman who gives birth to her child while overseas cannot automatically pass on her citizenship to her child. This is not a problem if the father is a citizen of a state that allows for the jus sanguinis transmission of nationality or if the child is born in a country that grants citizenship through jus soli. If neither of these conditions holds, however, or if the father is stateless, the child can be rendered stateless. Many examples exist of children becoming stateless due to conflicts in nationality laws because there is no overarching framework at the international level for regulating citizenship acquisition. It also bears pointing out that developed democracies are not immune to creating stateless persons via gender discrimination either.24
Thus, although “reliance upon the accident of birth is inscribed in the laws of all modern states and applied everywhere” (Shachar 2009, 4) through jus soli and jus sanguinis citizenship transmission, states differ in how they qualify the acquisition of this status. For instance, some states, such as the Dominican Republic, grant citizenship via jus soli as long as one of the parents is a citizen or a legal resident, while other states do not have such a stipulation. In other cases, citizenship through jus sanguinis is limited in application through the first generation born overseas if the parents are no longer residents of their state of citizenship. Other states have different conditions depending on whether a child is born to a mother who is married or is born out of wedlock.
Female citizens are also at risk of denationalization in some states because of the prevailing marriage and divorce laws of their state of origin or state of residence. That is, some states stipulate that a woman will lose her birth citizenship and acquire the citizenship of her foreign husband upon marriage. If the marriage dissolves, the woman may be rendered stateless if the state of her former husband’s citizenship no longer recognizes her as a national or if her state of original citizenship does not reinstate the citizenship she held at birth. These and many other cases of conflicts, or protection gaps, in nationality laws force people into liminality, or statelessness.25
Even when laws are nondiscriminatory in principle, they may be arbitrarily applied in practice. As I demonstrate in Chapters 3 and 4, people may become stateless when civil servants, or those individuals authorized to act on behalf of the state regarding the provision or renewal of citizenship and identity documents, fail to provide such documents, intentionally or not. As Bronwen Manby, discussing the case of statelessness in Africa, explains, civil servants have been known to deny birth certificates on discriminatory grounds or to delay the granting of a passport to a legitimate, but “non-native” citizen.
In practice, individual Africans far more often face the practical impossibility of obtaining official documentation than an explicit denial of nationality. Yet something as simple as a failure to register a birth or an indefinite delay in obtaining a national identification card … can have consequences just as damaging and permanent as if denationalization had been enacted in the law. (2009, 115)
Such problems are not confined to Africa. In various places around the world, minority citizens face obstacles in obtaining or retaining their identity documents. As Chapter 4 explains, the Dominican Republic has generated much attention in recent years because civil registry officers have denied birth certificates, and consequently proof of citizenship, to children born of Haitians in the country who, according to the law prevalent at the time, should have been recognized as Dominican nationals (Wooding 2008, 370; Goris 2011).
While possession of a birth certificate or other forms of state-issued identity documentation does not necessarily mean that a person falls under the operation of a state’s law as a citizen,26 such documents are still the primary means by which a person who is struggling to establish or retain citizenship is able to make a claim