Stolen citizenship While reliable statistics on statelessness are indeed difficult to come by,5 this challenge pales in comparison to that of promoting and protecting the right to a nationality today. Indeed, had the wider picture of statelessness from 2010 to 2019 been presented, it could have carried the headline A Decade of Denationalisation and the comment that only a fraction of people affected found a solution is equally applicable to the stateless as it is to displaced populations. At least 15 million people are stateless globally.6 Moreover, even though three-quarters of a million people confirmed or acquired a nationality during the last decade, at least as many were newly stateless due to intergenerational statelessness and emerging situations of denial and deprivation of nationality. This Decade of Denationalisation reached its crescendo on the 31st of August 2019, when 1.9 million people in Assam, India, were brought to the brink of statelessness because they were excluded from the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC), as discussed in the Symposium contribution by M. Mohsim Alam Bhat and Aashish Yavad. The citizenship crisis that this generated, aggravated by the subsequent passing of the widely criticised Citizenship Amendment Act, is now melding with the socioeconomic and health crisis precipitated by the global pandemic, placing those affected by the NRC process in a situation of extreme vulnerability – as is also the case for many stateless populations globally.7 While Assam was the site of the biggest mass-disenfranchisement of the 21st century to date,8 it was not the only case of large-scale denationalisation in the last decade. Six years earlier, on the 23rd of September 2013, the Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic passed a judgement that applied a narrowing interpretation of who qualifies for Dominican citizenship at birth retroactively all the way back to 1929.9 Tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent lost their nationality overnight in what some commentators described as a “civil genocide”. Following widespread international condemnation, a system for reviewing and remedying the status of those affected was put in place. However, it is (deliberately) complex and bureaucratic, and the vast majority of people are still waiting.10 Back in Asia, what many worried could ultimately become the plight of the Rohingya came to pass in 2017, as this long-persecuted community was subjected to acts of genocide.11 The deprivation and denial of nationality of the Rohingya has a longer history, as discussed in the Symposium contribution by Jasmine Burnley, but this latest devastating chapter in their treatment reminds us of the far-reaching impact that denationalisation can have – a lesson we already learnt many decades ago when the tactic of stripping citizenship as a precursor to committing atrocities was deployed by Nazi Germany. While developments in Assam, the Dominican Republic and in respect of the Rohingya may be the most visible markers of this Decade of Denationalisation, there are other situations too where citizenship 5 Chen, L., Nahmias, P. & Steinmuller, S. (2019) ‘UNHCR Statistical Reporting on Statelessness’, UNHCR Statistical Technical Series: 2019/1, available at https://www.unhcr.org/5d9e182e7.pdf (accessed 3 November 2020). 6 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (2020) ‘Statelessness in numbers: 2020. An overview and analysis of global statistics’, available at https://files.institutesi.org/ISI_statistics_analysis_2020.pdf (accessed 3 November 2020). 7 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (2020) ‘Stateless in a global pandemic’, https://files.institutesi.org/Covid19_Stateless_Impact_Report.pdf (accessed 3 November 2020). 8 Joint Statement: 125 Civil Society Organisations condemn the exclusion of 1.9 million people from the Assam NRC and call for urgent action to protect everyone’s right to a nationality, 5 September 2019, available at https://files.institutesi.org/cso-joint-statement-on-assam-nrc.pdf (accessed 3 November 2020). 9 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2015) ‘Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Dominican Republic’, available at http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/reports/pdfs/DominicanRepublic-2015.pdf (accessed 3 November 2020). 10 Belique, A., Oguisten, A., Lorac, E. & Pelletier, P. (2020) ‘Why we continue to fight for our right to nationality in the Dominican Republic and how you can help: An activists perspective’ in Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless. Deprivation of Nationality, 177-184. 11 See, among others, the reports of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, available at https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/MyanmarFFM/Pages/Index.aspx (accessed 3 November 2020). European University Institute available at 37