The Extraordinary Statelessness of Deepan Budlakoti 5 effective nationality”) criterion for citizenship is by no means the only or most desirable principle for deciding or extinguishing citizenship.6 De Groot, Vink and Honohan (n.d.), however, in their review of citizenship revocation patterns in Europe, argue that “[t]he fundamental principles governing provisions for loss of citizenship should be the absence of a genuine link and avoiding statelessness” (p. 6, emphasis added). A sociological study of statelessness, attentive to the quotidian denial of the relevance of the genuine link, and the stripping of a stateless person’s “reciprocal rights and duties” is critical for documenting the unremitting human rights violations and indignities suffered by those deprived of citizenship. Linda Kerber (2007, p. 31) argues that statelessness today “is most usefully understood not only as a status, but as a practice, made and remade in daily decisions of presidents and judges, border guards and prison guards, managers and pimps.” Yet, the process of legally and discursively producing statelessness involves not only decisions of various human agents, but also the agency of objects, particularly documents. As Actor-Network Theory (ANT) insists, human action is entangled with its physical environment and material objects. Following Kerber and the insights of ANT, this paper seeks to understand Deepan Budlakoti’s extraordinary statelessness as a process of production involving heterogeneous networks of various prison and immigration officials, tribunals and courts, documents produced in different jurisdictions, and circumstances that have stripped him of his citizenship and left him vulnerable to indefinite immigration detention and removal from the only country he has ever known or where he has held meaningful ties. Only limited, albeit critical, segments of his ongoing networked production of statelessness will be examined here to explore how a “narrow question of fact” has served to extinguish a person’s lifelong formal and lived membership in Canada and create statelessness (Budlakoti v Canada (Citizenship & Immigration), 2015 FCA 139, para 10).7 ANT provides a On the eve of World War II, Nottebohm applied for and received citizenship from Liechtenstein, a country where he had few to no ties, in order to become a citizen of a neutral country rather than a belligerent one. Upon returning to Guatemala, he was refused entry on the grounds that he was an enemy alien, since Guatemalan authorities refused to recognize his change of nationality and regarded him as German. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) applied the “genuine link” test to decide against Nottebohm’s claim to citizenship in Lichtenstein. 6 The genuine link theory stemming from Nottebohm does not purport to regulate nationality for all purposes. Sloane argues that the genuine link theory of citizenship, which has “developed into a kind of unreflective dogma” throughout the international law of nationality, is misguided and anachronistic. As people travel, work and live internationally, social attachment to nation states attenuates. Instead, he proposes that international law should regulate nationality in terms of its functions, “so as to better effectuate the diverse roles that nationality serves today” (Sloane, 2009, p. 4). Nonetheless, he concedes that in some areas of law, such as in certain human rights cases, Nottebohm’s dicta may remain appropriate and effective, “serving to protect precisely the kind of deep social bonds emphasized in Nottebohm against a formal nationality imposed by law” (Sloane, 2009, p. 5, emphasis added). 7 The “narrow question of fact” referred to by Justice Stratas in the Federal Court of Appeal decision of June 2015 is whether Mr. Budlakoti’s parents’ employment with the Indian High Commission ended before or after his birth. If before, then Deepan enjoyed jus soli citizenship; if Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017