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Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
Part I: Introduction
1. International Law and the Right to a Nationality
1.1. What's in a Word: Citizenship or Nationality?
1.2. The Regulation of Nationality in International Law
1.3. The Content of Citizenship Rights
1.4. The Relevance of the Right to a Nationality in Africa
Part II: Empire to Independence: The Invention of Nationality in Africa
2. Membership in the Pre-Colonial Era
3. The European Colonial Period
3.1. British Territories
3.2. French Territories
3.3. Others
4. Transition to Independence
4.1. The Ottoman Empire
4.2. British Territories
4.3. French Territories
4.4. Others
Part III: African Nationality Laws Since Independence
5. Trends and Patterns in Nationality Law
5.1. Acquisition at Birth: The Balance of Jus Soli and Jus Sanguinis
5.2. Gender Equality
5.3. Dual Nationality
5.4. Naturalisation
5.5. Loss and Deprivation
5.6. Making Sense of Legal Amendments
6. Identification and Registration
6.1. Proof of Nationality: The Civil/Common Law Divide
6.2. Civil Registration
6.3. Child Protection
6.4. Identification and Nationality
6.5. The Relationship Between the Formal and the Informal
Part IV: Country Case Studies
7. Who is a Native?
7.1. Dual Citizenship, Denationalisation and Disenfranchisement in Zimbabwe
7.2. The 'Lebanese' of Sierra Leone
7.3. 'Asians' and other 'others' in Kenya and Uganda
7.4. Côte d'Ivoire's War of Conjunctions: The 'and' and the 'or'
7.5. The Banyarwanda of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
7.6. Mauritania's Efforts to Enforce a 'Nation-State'
7.7. 'Indigeneity' in Nigeria: The Links Between Local and National
8. State Successions Since Independence
8.1. Eritrea/Ethiopia: State Succession and Mass Expulsion
8.2. Sudan and South Sudan
8.3. The Bakassi Peninsula
8.4. The Tebu and the 'Aouzou strip' between Chad and Libya
8.5. Other ICJ Rulings in Border Disputes
9. Access to Citizenship for Refugees
9.1. Former Liberian and Sierra Leonean Refugees in Guinea
9.2. Tanzania: A Unique Offer of Citizenship to Refugees
9.3. South Africa: The Dream Deferred
Part V: Conclusions
10. The Importance of Nationality Law in Africa
10.1. Categories of the Excluded and Commonalities with other Regions
10.2. Patterns, Continuities, and Discontinuities in the Law
10.3. The Influence of International Law
10.4. The Instrumentalisation of Nationality Laws
10.5. The Unintended Consequences of the Initial Frameworks for Nationality Law
10.6. The Impact of Changes in Nationality Laws
10.7. Marginal Citizens: The Buffer Zone
10.8. The Importance of Recognised Nationality and the Impact of Statelessness
11.
An Agenda for Research and Reform
11.1. Pathways to Citizenship
11.2. Resolving the Question of Theoretical other Nationalities
11.3. The Situation of Nomads
11.4. Bringing Naturalisation in from the Arbitrary Cold
11.5. The Role of Decentralised Decision-Making
11.6. The Importance of Subsidiary Legislation and Administrative Procedures
11.7. 'Legal identity' and New Technologies in Africa
11.8. Future Directions: Nationality in National and Continental Law
Bibliography
List of Citizenship Laws
Index
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CITIZENSHIP IN AFRICA: THE LAW OF BELONGING Citizenship in Africa provides a comprehensive exploration of nationality laws in Africa, placing them in their theoretical and historical context. It offers the first serious attempt to analyse the impact of nationality law on politics and society in different African states from a trans-continental comparative perspective. Taking a four-part approach, Parts I and II set the book within the framework of existing scholarship on citizenship, from both sociological and legal perspectives, and examine the history of nationality laws in Africa from the colonial period to the present day. Part III considers case studies which illustrate the application and misapplication of the law in practice, and the relationship of legal and political developments in each country. Finally, Part IV explores the impact of the law on politics, and its relevance for questions of identity and ‘belonging’ today, concluding with a set of issues for further research. Ambitious in scope and compelling in analysis, this is an important new work on citizenship in Africa.

ii 

Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging Bronwen Manby

HART PUBLISHING Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Kemp House, Chawley Park, Cumnor Hill, Oxford, OX2 9PH, UK HART PUBLISHING, the Hart/Stag logo, BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Bronwen Manby, 2018 Bronwen Manby has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. While every care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of this work, no responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting or refraining from action as a result of any statement in it can be accepted by the authors, editors or publishers. All UK Government legislation and other public sector information used in the work is Crown Copyright ©. All House of Lords and House of Commons information used in the work is Parliamentary Copyright ©. This information is reused under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/ open-government-licence/version/3) except where otherwise stated. All Eur-lex material used in the work is © European Union, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/, 1998–2018. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Names: Manby, Bronwen, author. Title: Citizenship in Africa : the law of belonging / Bronwen Manby. Description: Portland, Oregon : Hart Publishing, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2018023018 (print)  |  LCCN 2018026006 (ebook)  |  ISBN 9781509920792 (Epub)  |  ISBN 9781509920778 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Citizenship—Africa. Classification: LCC KQC146 (ebook)  |  LCC KQC146 .M365 2018 (print)  |  DDC 342.608/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023018 ISBN: HB: 978-1-50992-077-8 ePDF: 978-1-50992-078-5 ePub: 978-1-50992-079-2 Typeset by Compuscript Ltd, Shannon To find out more about our authors and books visit www.hartpublishing.co.uk. Here you will find extracts, author information, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First I must thank Professor René de Groot of Maastricht University for suggesting the doctorate that forms the basis of this book, and for taking on the role of my supervisor. Thanks are also due to my PhD examination committee, especially Maarten Vink of Maastricht University and Rainer Bauböck of the European University Institute, who provided additional and very helpful comments on the concluding chapters; as did Mike McGovern of the University of Michigan (with even less obligation to do so). The anonymous reviewers who provided feedback on the book proposal also gave invaluable advice. The thesis itself drew on the publications and reports I had previously written on the right to a nationality in Africa, many of them listed in the bibliography. Much of this research was conducted on behalf of the Open Society Foundations and UNHCR. I should like to emphasise also my debts to Chidi Odinkalu and Ibrahima Kane, who have informed my thinking on these issues over many years and have been inspirational leaders and colleagues in advocacy efforts on the continent. Pascal Kambale was an early sounding-board on the political complexities of the Democratic Republic of Congo; while Mirna Adjami gave generously of her time to comment on the intricacies of the law in Côte d’Ivoire. I have benefited greatly from visiting fellowships at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics, from working with UNHCR’s Statelessness section in Geneva and staff in the field, and above all from ongoing discussions with as the community of scholars and activists working on statelessness in different countries around the world with whom I have had the privilege of interacting. Finally, thanks to Robert Cohen, whose support throughout the years I have been researching and writing on these issues has been the foundation of everything.

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������v Abbreviations�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xi PART I INTRODUCTION 1. International Law and the Right to a Nationality������������������������������������������������3 1.1. What’s in a Word: Citizenship or Nationality?�������������������������������������������6 1.2. The Regulation of Nationality in International Law�������������������������������11 1.3. The Content of Citizenship Rights������������������������������������������������������������23 1.4. The Relevance of the Right to a Nationality in Africa����������������������������27 PART II EMPIRE TO INDEPENDENCE: THE INVENTION OF NATIONALITY IN AFRICA 2. Membership in the Pre-Colonial Era������������������������������������������������������������������37 3. The European Colonial Period�����������������������������������������������������������������������������42 3.1. British Territories�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������43 3.2. French Territories����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������48 3.3. Others������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������56 4. Transition to Independence����������������������������������������������������������������������������������60 4.1. The Ottoman Empire����������������������������������������������������������������������������������60 4.2. British Territories�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������61 4.3. French Territories����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������65 4.4. Others������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������68 PART III AFRICAN NATIONALITY LAWS SINCE INDEPENDENCE 5. Trends and Patterns in Nationality Law��������������������������������������������������������������73 5.1. Acquisition at Birth: The Balance of Jus Soli and Jus Sanguinis������������75 5.2. Gender Equality�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������98 5.3. Dual Nationality�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������109

viii  Contents 5.4. Naturalisation���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������111 5.5. Loss and Deprivation��������������������������������������������������������������������������������115 5.6. Making Sense of Legal Amendments������������������������������������������������������122 6. Identification and Registration���������������������������������������������������������������������������126 6.1. Proof of Nationality: The Civil/ Common Law Divide������������������������126 6.2. Civil Registration���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������128 6.3. Child Protection����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������131 6.4. Identification and Nationality������������������������������������������������������������������133 6.5. The Relationship Between the Formal and the Informal���������������������138 PART IV COUNTRY CASE STUDIES 7. Who is a Native?���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������147 7.1. Dual Citizenship, Denationalisation and Disenfranchisement in Zimbabwe�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������149 7.2. The ‘Lebanese’ of Sierra Leone�����������������������������������������������������������������164 7.3. ‘Asians’ and other ‘others’ in Kenya and Uganda�����������������������������������176 7.4. Côte d’Ivoire’s War of Conjunctions: The ‘and’ and the ‘or’�����������������199 7.5. The Banyarwanda of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo������������221 7.6. Mauritania’s Efforts to Enforce a ‘Nation-State’�������������������������������������242 7.7. ‘Indigeneity’ in Nigeria: The Links Between Local and National��������248 8. State Successions Since Independence��������������������������������������������������������������259 8.1. Eritrea/Ethiopia: State Succession and Mass Expulsion�����������������������261 8.2. Sudan and South Sudan����������������������������������������������������������������������������267 8.3. The Bakassi Peninsula�������������������������������������������������������������������������������279 8.4. The Tebu and the ‘Aouzou strip’ between Chad and Libya������������������282 8.5. Other ICJ Rulings in Border Disputes����������������������������������������������������284 9. Access to Citizenship for Refugees��������������������������������������������������������������������288 9.1. Former Liberian and Sierra Leonean Refugees in Guinea�������������������294 9.2. Tanzania: A Unique Offer of Citizenship to Refugees��������������������������298 9.3. South Africa: The Dream Deferred���������������������������������������������������������302 PART V CONCLUSIONS 10. The Importance of Nationality Law in Africa��������������������������������������������������311 10.1. Categories of the Excluded and Commonalities with other Regions�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������312 10.2. Patterns, Continuities, and Discontinuities in the Law������������������������314

Contents  ix 10.3. The Influence of International Law���������������������������������������������������������316 10.4. The Instrumentalisation of Nationality Laws�����������������������������������������318 10.5. The Unintended Consequences of the Initial Frameworks for Nationality Law������������������������������������������������������������������������������������321 10.6. The Impact of Changes in Nationality Laws������������������������������������������324 10.7. Marginal Citizens: The Buffer Zone��������������������������������������������������������328 10.8. The Importance of Recognised Nationality and the Impact of Statelessness�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������330 11. An Agenda for Research and Reform���������������������������������������������������������������334 11.1. Pathways to Citizenship����������������������������������������������������������������������������337 11.2. Resolving the Question of Theoretical other Nationalities������������������338 11.3. The Situation of Nomads��������������������������������������������������������������������������339 11.4. Bringing Naturalisation in from the Arbitrary Cold����������������������������342 11.5. The Role of Decentralised Decision-Making�����������������������������������������343 11.6. The Importance of Subsidiary Legislation and Administrative Procedures��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������344 11.7. ‘Legal identity’ and New Technologies in Africa�����������������������������������345 11.8. Future Directions: Nationality in National and Continental Law�������348 Bibliography���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������350 List of Citizenship Laws��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������374 Index��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������383

x 

ABBREVIATIONS ACHPR

African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights

ACERWC

African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child

ACRWC

African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child

AEF

Afrique équatoriale française (French Equatorial Africa)

AOF

Afrique occidentale française (French West Africa)

AU

African Union

CEDAW

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

CERD

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

CPA

Comprehensive Peace Agreement (Sudan)

CRC

Convention on the Rights of the Child

DRC

Democratic Republic of Congo

EAC

East African Community

ECOWAS

Economic Community of West African States

EU

European Union

ICCPR

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

ICJ

International Court of Justice

IOM

International Organisation for Migration

IRIN

Integrated Regional Information Networks (formerly of the UN)

OAU

Organisation of African Unity

PALOP

Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa (African countries with Portuguese as the Official Language

PCA

Permanent Court of Arbitration

PCIJ

Permanent Court of International Justice

SADC

Southern African Development Community

xii  Abbreviations SPLA/M

Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement

UK

United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)

UN

United Nations

UNHCR

UN High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF

UN Children’s Fund

part i Introduction

2 

1 International Law and the Right to a Nationality A child born in Kailahun district of north east Sierra Leone as a member of the Kissi people is likely to have extended family across three countries. The district forms a promontory of territory between Liberia and Guinea; an anomaly created by the classic ruthless division of existing socio-political units by colonial borders. Each of the three countries has entirely different formal legal traditions, and entirely different rules on who qualifies for its nationality. Let us say that our Sierra Leonean child, we’ll call him Samson, does well in school, and wishes to go and study in Freetown on a government scholarship. To qualify for the scholarship, he will need confirmation that he is Sierra Leonean. The rules applied in Sierra Leone under the 1973 Citizenship Act are that a person is a citizen if born in Sierra Leone of one parent also born there, provided the parent is of ‘negro African descent’. Samson has a cousin in Guinea, we’ll call him Georges. Georges wants to study in Conakry, and to get the equivalent scholarship he has to fulfil the requirements on nationality set out in the 1983 civil code, and show either that he has a Guinean parent, or that he was born in Guinea and has remained resident there until he turned 18. The third cousin, Lisa, was born in Sierra Leone, but moved to Liberia when very small with her mother, who was herself born there, and she has grown up in Liberia. Liberian law contradicts itself: the constitution says that the child of a Liberian mother or father obtains Liberian citizenship at birth; but the Citizenship and Aliens Act of 1973 says that citizenship is acquired automatically based on birth in Liberia, while women cannot transmit citizenship to their children born outside Liberia. Only ‘negroes’ are eligible for Liberian citizenship. One ethnic group, three countries, three entirely different citizenship regimes; or three and a half, if Liberia’s contradictions are taken into account. Add to these complications the fact that birth registration, the primary route established in law to prove a child’s origins, is only around 5 per cent in Liberia, and well under 50 per cent in Guinea, though almost 80 per cent in Sierra Leone. Guinea has had a requirement to carry a national identity card since independence, but in practice less than half the adult population is estimated to hold one. Sierra Leone and Liberia only began the process of introducing national identity cards from around 2015. In Guinea, a magistrate has the power to confirm whether or not Georges is Guinean by birth; in Liberia and Sierra Leone, however, the executive branch is in complete control of the process of determining if a person is a citizen.

4  International Law and the Right to a Nationality In practice, of course, these rules may be of little relevance. What Samson, Georges and Lisa really need for confirmation of their citizenship is the attestation of a traditional leader or other local dignitary recognised by the authorities of each State that they belong to his or her community. With such a letter or oral confirmation, they are likely to be issued the documents they need. But hold on. Take away the family relationships and solid connections to a community. What if Lisa was the child of a war, the product of a rape by a soldier (Kailahun was the first place in Sierra Leone attacked by the Revolutionary United Front in 1991)? What if Georges was found abandoned as a baby, brought up (but, of course, never formally adopted) by the family who found him? What if Samson’s parents were members of the Mandingo ethnic group, born in Guinea, who moved to Sierra Leone for better economic opportunities and because the schools were better? Take away the ‘obvious’ nature of belonging and suddenly the rules and procedures, coverage of birth registration, and national identification systems become much more important. Not to mention access to legal assistance and funds to support the fees, official and unofficial, that will surround the application for recognition as a national. There is a rich field of scholarship on questions of identity and belonging in Africa, on the conundrum of nation-building in the post-independence States. This literature is concerned with the complex questions of defining the membership of the ‘nation’ itself, the entity usually taken for granted in similar debates in the home territories of the European colonial powers. It considers the relative contribution of ethnic identity and diversity as a cause of conflict and political dysfunction, in relation to other factors such as regional underdevelopment, or the accessibility of rich and portable natural resources. More recently, attention has been drawn to the increased intensity of ‘autochtone-allochtone’ or ‘indigene-settler’ conflicts following the re-introduction of multi-party democracy during the 1990s. By contrast to debates over identity and belonging in other continents, however, discussion of the basis of nationality law, the rights of those born in the country, the rules on descent, and the procedures for integration of immigrants through naturalisation have not received major comparative analysis. The lack of attention to nationality laws in Africa is understandable: on the one hand, most Africans have historically held no document that officially recognised their nationality; on the other, administration of nationality law is often highly corrupt or clearly instrumentalised (or both), meaning that the law, as it is applied in practice, may be quite distant from the law as it is on paper. In a context where censuses are highly unreliable; where many, perhaps most, children are not registered at birth; where the economy is largely informal; and where a large percentage of adults get by with no formal documentation, the definition and content of the legal tie between a person and the State where he or she lives seems less urgent to determine. The situation of those whose right to a nationality is under threat may not differ very much from their neighbours whose nationality is uncontested; while

International Law and the Right to a Nationality  5 the same problems also arise in communities whose right to belong at the national level is uncontroversial and the issue at hand is the right to access resources in a particular local government area, not an international passport. This book, however, advances a set of interlinked arguments for the relevance of nationality law to the broader crises of citizenship in the continent, and therefore for the role that reforms to the normative frameworks of the law may play at both national and international levels. Firstly, an examination of the history of nationality law in Africa, from the colonial period, through the transitional provisions on the creation of the new States, and the initial frameworks of nationality applied to those born after independence, sheds light on the (often unanticipated) consequences of these different frameworks for national cohesion today. Secondly, it is worth paying attention to the detail of the ways in which nationality law has been amended and applied – or manipulated – since independence, in comparative perspective, for insights into the political process and the ‘imagining’ of the national (or local) community. Nationality law is relevant to broader questions of citizenship and participation in African States, as it is in other countries, despite – or because of – the history by which those States came to be created and the institutional weaknesses that resulted. Thirdly, the impact of defects in nationality law and administration on the most marginalised is real and likely to increase, as African States follow the rest of the world in strengthening requirements for identification to access services and as travel within and between countries without documents is ever more difficult. Finally, the relevance of the law means both that efforts to reform the law at national level are meaningful, but also that the weak international normative framework on nationality needs strengthening. I argue that variations in citizenship laws and regulations may have had important impacts in their own right on the ways in which questions of autochthony or indigeneity have played out in African States since independence. These variations themselves deserve greater study, both to enrich understanding of political crises based on questions of belonging, and to inform future efforts at reform. The substantive and procedural content of nationality laws can in itself either undermine the project of nation-building that has so bedevilled the continent or, alternatively, become a tool to use in that effort. To date, advocacy for reform of nationality laws in Africa has focused on two main issues: gender equality in transmission of nationality, led by the women’s rights movement; and dual nationality, influenced by the trend to gender equality, but largely driven by African diaspora groups. They have had great success: Africa has shared the strong global trends towards equal rights of men and women in nationality, and towards acceptance of dual nationality. There has been much less advocacy around an individual’s right to a nationality in the State where he or she has the strongest connections; where he or she was born and brought up, has earned a living, born children, and centred his or her life. In part, this lack of advocacy reflects – and is reflected by – the weakness of international law in this area.

6  International Law and the Right to a Nationality While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 proclaims that ‘­everyone has the right to a nationality’, the precise country obliged to recognise a person’s nationality has, despite some restrictions, remained quite unclear. Though the point on gender equality is now (mostly) conceded, States in Africa as elsewhere still hold strongly onto the idea of nationality being a matter of sovereign discretion and not of human rights. This book joins the chorus of those arguing that the national and international law frameworks need reform, to establish the right to nationality based on criteria recognising strong connections to a territory through birth and residence as well as descent, and records efforts at the national and African levels to do so.

1.1.  What’s in a Word: Citizenship or Nationality? Some discussion of terminology is a necessary preliminary before embarking on a debate over the impact of formal legal rules on broader questions belonging and participation, starting from the words ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’ themselves. Nationality and citizenship are now used as synonyms in international law, to describe the legal relationship between the State and the individual that recognises the individual as having certain rights and obligations in that State.1 In this book, the terms will accordingly be used interchangeably, but with usage varying by context (usually the language of the country under consideration and the terminology of that country’s laws). However, it is hard to understand debates around citizenship without understanding how these terms are used in different contexts. The two dominant legal traditions considered in this book, the common law and civil law, have different approaches. ‘Nationality’ and ‘national’ are in both traditions the usual term used in international legal texts for the idea of legal membership of a country; though even there the usage is not consistent.2 At domestic level, laws in the anglophone common law tradition (including the US, for these purposes) most commonly use ‘citizenship’ as the term to describe the legal bond between individual and State. The UK itself creates enormous confusion with the different terms that have been used over time (see Chapter 3.1), and the colonial distinctions have traces

1 Paul Weis, Nationality and Statelessness in International Law (2nd edn, Brill 1979) ch 1; Laurie Fransman, Adrian Berry and Alison Harvey, Fransman’s British Nationality Law (3rd edn, Bloomsbury Professional 2011) ch 1.2. 2 eg, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality’ (Art 15). Yet some treaties use ‘citizenship’ and ‘citizen’ in the same context: the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination refers to discrimination between citizens and non-citizens (Art 25), rather than nationals and non-nationals. French then contributes a third term, that of ressortissant, often used where ‘national’ appears in the English version of a text. A ressortissant is a person falling under the jurisdiction of a State, but has a wider meaning than that of national, covering persons under the protection of a State; though the extent to which it covers nonnationals is not entirely clear. Weis (n 1) 8–10.

What’s in a Word: Citizenship or Nationality?  7 till today in the several different categories of ‘British national’, among whom only ‘British citizens’ (a status created in 1981) have the full range of rights.3 In the French and Belgian civil law tradition, meanwhile, nationalité is the term used at both international and national levels to describe the legal bond between a person and a political entity, and the rules for membership of the community. Where a Commonwealth State would have a national citizenship act, a member of the Francophonie has a code de la nationalité. Citoyenneté is not used in this context. Moving beyond the world of law and legal definition, moreover, the two words come from different historical and academic traditions, and in practice different authors use them to mean different things, even when discussing legal issues. These etymological overtones make it hard to use the terms equally with neutral effect. In general, we can make some broad distinctions. Citizenship and its cognates in other languages – derived from city – have connotations related to civil rights and participation. Nationality and its cognates – derived from nation – have connotations related to ethnicity, family, and culture.4 For sociologists and political scientists, the scholarly debate over ‘citizenship’ is mainly about the content of citizenship: what are (or should be) the rights of members of the national community?5 These debates have a genealogy reaching far back into European history, from the challenge to allegiance based on feudal overlordship and the divine right of kings, ascribed at birth and due to the sovereign from all in his territory. As the great dynastic monarchies began to decline, enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Rousseau theorised the social contract that binds citizens together (meaning that citizenship should be consented to, even notionally by choice of residence, as an adult man).6 Others favouring the city States of Switzerland rather drew on descent as a proxy for consent (since a child could be assumed to wish to share his father’s citizenship, with the option to reject

3 British legislation since 1914 has used the term ‘nationality’ to cover a range of statuses governed in law. The term ‘citizen’ was first used in 1948 (to create the category of ‘citizen of the UK and colonies’ for those who were formerly ‘British subjects’), and the status of ‘British citizen’ was introduced by the British Nationality Act of 1981. The act maintains distinctions between eight different grades of nationals (some of them almost obsolete), with only ‘British citizens’ having full rights, including the ‘right of abode’ in the UK. As a result of these complications the UK has unilaterally made declarations in relation to the definition of its nationals for the purposes of the EU, while the UK has not ratified the Protocol 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights (on the right of a person to enter the country of which he or she is a national) or the European Convention on Nationality 1997. See Fransman, Berry and Harvey (n 1) 65 & 87–89. 4 For the wealth of possible confusions, see the discussion of the meanings of ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’ and their equivalents in many different European languages at the website of the Global Citizenship Observatory http://globalcit.eu/terminology/. 5 A useful overview of these debates is provided in the essays extracted in Gershon Shafir (ed), The Citizenship Debates: A Reader (University of Minnesota Press 1998). 6 For an exposition of the distinction between citizenship based on ascription or consent, with particular reference to the American context, see Peter H Schuck and Rogers M Smith, Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Policy (Yale Univ Press 1985); also Myres S McDougal, Harold D Lasswell and Lung-chu Chen, ‘Nationality and Human Rights: The Protection of the Individual in External Arenas’ (1974) 83 Yale Law Journal 900 at 918–928.

8  International Law and the Right to a Nationality it at majority),7 and thereby also created an assumption of shared identity rather than common political allegiance. Discussions since then have continued to swirl around the different conceptions of citizenship: whether it should be ascribed at birth or acquired through voluntary agreement; whether it is a legal status based on a notional contract between citizen and State and carrying with it rights and obligations, or rather a ‘republican’ (in the French sense) or ‘performative’ idea, in which people become and are recognised as citizens through their participation in the political and public space.8 Some in the ‘citizenship studies’ tradition argue for a complete move away from the ‘sovereign temporal and spatial framework’ in theorising citizenship (in the broader sense).9 ‘Nationality’ also has its own traditions separate from international law. The proximity of ‘nationality’ to the idea of ‘nation’, means that in some contexts the term nationality is used with the connotation that someone of a particular (legal) nationality should belong to the racial, religious or ethnic group believed to make up that nation.10 In this sense, the difference between citizenship and nationality is seen not as the distinction between the rights of members of the polity and the rules that define who is a member, but between a definition based on active participation, and a status-based definition, in this case deriving from descent and identity. Patrick Chabal, for example, uses ‘nationality’ to mean ‘the cluster of historical and cultural characteristics which are (implicitly or explicitly) recognised by the national subjects as defining a particular country, if only in relation to other countries’.11 Patricia Nanz, discussing the EU citizenship regime, uses nationality to mean belonging, and citizenship to mean legal status.12 The frequent use

7 The founding exponent of this view was the Swiss writer Emmerich de Vattel, highly influential in the early discussions of citizenship in the US; his book Le droit des gens, Ou Principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite & aux affaires des nations & des souverains, first published 1758, was rapidly translated into English with the first definitive edition in 1797 titled The Law of Nations, Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns. On citizenship, see especially Book I, ch 19, Of Our Native Country, and Several Things That Relate to It. 8 On the connotations of nationalité and citoyenneté in French, see Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité française de la Révolution à nos jours (Grasset 2002); Gérard Noiriel, ‘Socio-histoire d’un concept: Les usages du mot « nationalité » au XIXe siècle’ (1995) 20 Genèses 4; Olivier Gohin, ‘La citoyenneté dans l’outre-mer français’ (2002) 101 Revue française d’administration publique 69. 9 Aolileann Ní Mhurchú, ‘Citizenship beyond State and Sovereignty’ in Engin F Isin and Peter Nyers (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (Routledge 2014). 10 Chaim Gans, ‘Citizenship and Nationhood’ in Ayelet Shachar and others (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (Oxford University Press 2017). 11 Patrick Chabal, Power in Africa: An Essay in Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan 1993) 121. 12 Patricia Nanz, ‘Mobility, Migrants and Solidarity: Towards an Emerging European Citizenship’ in Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik (eds), Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders and Gender (NYU Press 2009) 412. See also Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (Palgrave Macmillan 2000) 12, on the ‘contradiction between citizenship and nationality, or between the nation of a citizen as an individual abstracted from cultural characteristics, and that of a national as a member of a community with common cultural values’.

What’s in a Word: Citizenship or Nationality?  9 of ‘nation-state’ in both journalism and academic literature to mean, in different contexts, both a State based on a pre-existing culturally and ethnically unified nation, and a State that is in the process of building an idea of national identity, does not help with this confusion.13 The very name of the United Nations, a collective of States responsible for defining the rules on these issues at international level, reinforces the problem. In law, however, neither ‘citizenship’ nor ‘nationality’ is used (in English or French) to indicate the ethnic origin of the individual concerned: the terms refer only to the legal bond between a person and a State, and the rights and obligations that accompany that bond. Yet even in legal usage, the terms to describe the main ways in which the legal status of nationality is acquired can lead to misunderstandings. In particular, the distinction between jus sanguinis and jus soli systems for acquiring nationality encourages the sense that jus sanguinis – the law of blood, even if disguised in Latin – means membership of an ethnically defined nation; a meaning emphasised by the formerly almost universal rule that it was only a father that could pass nationality to his child, allegedly to avoid the possibility of dual nationality but in practice preserving male-line genealogies. A jus sanguinis principle need not have any ethnic or racial basis – the requirement is only that the parent be a citizen (including by naturalisation). Nonetheless, the principle has in some countries an explicit ethnic or racial component, so that access to legal citizenship is facilitated or restricted based on membership of the dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in a country.14 Similar nuances exist in other languages. In a discussion of the management of nationality in the context of State succession in Sudan, Munzoul Assal argues that: In Sudan… both law and common discourse focus on nationality (jinsiyya in Arabic) rather than on citizenship (muwatana in Arabic). [T]he concept of nationality valorises ethnicity… emphasising nationality instead of citizenship results in disenfranchising the less privileged segments of the population. There is a need to shift the emphasis from nationality to citizenship, which becomes particularly urgent as the constitutional foundation is being laid for two new States.15 13 eg, see Richard Dowden ‘The State of the African State: The Past, Present and Future of the Nation State in Africa’ IPPR Progressive Review (Institute for Public Policy Research 2004). Jeffrey Herbst talks of finding ‘alternatives to the nation-state in Africa’, Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton University Press 2001) 259. See also, Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (University of Chicago Press 2009), on the idea of defining the nation in the ‘republican’ way; Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford University Press 1996); Castles and Davidson (n 12); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press 1996). 14 Even in international treaties, the use of ‘national or social origin’ in, eg, the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Art 2), creates a sense of overlap between the idea of nationality and the idea of ethnic identity. 15 Munzoul AM Assal, ‘Nationality and Citizenship Questions in Sudan after the Southern Sudan Referendum Vote’ (Christian Michelsen Institute 2011). For more on the distinctions between jinsiyya and muwatana see Gianluca P Parolin, Citizenship in the Arab World: Kin, Religion and Nation-State (Amsterdam University Press 2009).

10  International Law and the Right to a Nationality No doubt there are further overlaps and nuances in the words used to translate these concepts into national languages across the African continent.16 Even in contexts divorced from ideas of ethnic affiliation, distinctions between nationality as the legal bond with a particular State applicable at the international level, and citizenship as the full right to participate in the public affairs of that State, are by no means irrelevant in the twenty first century. Most obviously, gender discrimination was the norm until very recently in most countries and, though diminishing, is still quite pervasive. In the realm of nationality law, some of the older international treaties in fact assumed that gender discrimination would be applied, while trying to minimise the Statelessness that could result (see Chapter 1.2). In relation to citizenship as political participation, adult women were of course late to be given the universal right to vote (and still cannot in some countries), and often had or have lesser rights in r