STATELESSNESS AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE EAST AFRICAN COMMUNITY amnesty if documents had been fraudulently acquired.224 Nonetheless, the risk must remain of some remaining without recognition of Kenyan citizenship, given the general discrimination faced by Somali Kenyans. Descendants of Nubians settled in Kenya before independence Among those with reported difficulties in obtaining documents recognising their Kenyan citizenship are members of the Kenyan Nubian community.225 The Nubians were conscripted into the British army from what is now Sudan, at the time administered jointly by Britain and Egypt. They became known as the King’s African Rifles, or as askaris (the Arabic/Swahili word for soldier or guard), during the British expeditions of colonisation in East Africa and in both world wars. When they were demobilized in Kenya they were not given any meaningful compensation or benefits, although they were allocated small plots of land for farming in Kibera, near—now part of—Nairobi. Representatives of the Nubian community have sought to litigate their case before the Kenyan courts, resorting to the African continental human rights institutions when that was unsuccessful: both the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights have found against Kenya.226 The campaign for Nubian citizenship has somewhat eased the situation for the Nubian community in terms of access to identification documents. It is not possible to say that as a group they are stateless or without recognition of Kenyan citizenship, since most do in fact have identity cards. However, Nubians are still subject to additional vetting requirements, such as requiring parents to provide fingerprints or to escort their adult children when applying for identity cards and passports, and some may remain stateless.227 Rwanda Rwanda’s 2008 nationality law provides the most complete protection against statelessness among all the Partner States of the East African Community. The law provides that both a child of unknown parents and a child born in Rwanda who cannot acquire the nationality of his or her parents shall be presumed to be Rwandan (Article 9); and it specifically provides for stateless persons who marry a Rwandan national to be able to acquire nationality (Article 11), as well as stateless children adopted by a Rwandan (Article 12). In a provision introduced in the 2004 nationality code, children born in Rwanda of foreign parents have been able to apply for nationality on majority (Article 9). There are procedures in place to ensure that children of 224 “Joint Communiqué: Ministerial Tripartite Commission for the Voluntary Repatriation of Somali Refugees from Kenya to Somalia”, 25 June 2016; “UN starts sorting false from genuine refugees in Dadaab”, The Nation (Nairobi), 6 July 2016. 225 The Kenyan Nubian situation has been quite extensively documented. See Maurice Odhiambo Makoloo, Kenya: Minorities, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Diversity, Minority Rights Group International / CEMIRIDE, 2005; Douglas H. Johnson, “Tribe or nationality? The Sudanese diaspora and the Kenyan Nubis”, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2009, pp. 112-131; Adam Hussein Adam, “Kenyan Nubians: standing up to statelessness”, Forced Migration Review, Vol. 32, 2009 (Statelessness); and also the articles by Samantha Balaton-Chrimes: “The Nubians of Kenya and the emancipatory potential of collective recognition”, Australasian Review of African Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2011, pp. 12-31; “Counting as Citizens: Recognition of the Nubians in the 2009 Kenyan census”, Ethnopolitics Vol. 10, No. 2, 2011, pp. 205-218; “Indigeneity and Kenya's Nubians: seeking equality in difference or sameness?” Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2, 2013, pp. 331-354; “Statelessness, identity cards and citizenship as status in the case of the Nubians of Kenya”, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2014, pp. 15-28. 226 In 2003, representatives of the Nubian community brought a case to the Kenyan courts seeking confirmation of their citizenship and the right to be issued with relevant official documents (Nairobi High Court, civil case no. 256 of 2003). After more than three years of blocked progress at national level on procedural grounds, the Nubians took their case to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. The African Committee of Experts ruled on Kenyan Nubian Children’s Case in 2011 (see footnote 15). The African Commission found numerous violations of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, including Article 5 on recognition of legal status, in its decision on Communication 317/06, ACHPR: The Nubian Community v. Kenya, adopted in February 2015. 227 Ben Oppenheim and Brenna Marea Powell, “Legal Identity in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: Lessons from Kibera, Kenya”, Open Society Justice Initiative Policy Paper, October 2015; Balaton-Chrimes, “Statelessness, identity cards and citizenship”. UNHCR / September 2018 55