CITIZENSHIP AND STATELESSNESS IN THE HORN OF AFRICA \Y The Human Rights Council has elaborated on states’ obligations to prevent statelessness and remove discrimination in a number of resolutions on the right to a nationality, inculding on the rights of women and chilren in 2012784 and on women’s equal nationality rights in 2016.28 Extensive additional guidance, as well as on the actions taken within the #IBelong Global Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024, is available at the UNHCR website resource page on statelessness.?°6 Among the states considered in this report, all are parties to the ICCPR and CRC; Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia are parties to CEDAW; Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia are parties to the CRPD. None are parties to CERD or CMW, or to either of the statelessness conventions. Somalia, however, pledged in 2019 to accede during 2020 to both the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (see Annex 2). Nationality on Succession of States State succession, when sovereignty over a territory is transferred from one state to another, creates well-recognised challenges in relation to determination of the legal membership of the successor states. Whether in the context of decolonisation in Africa, the break-up of federal territories, or the secession of a part of a state to form its own new country, the transfer of legal authority creates multiple opportunities for people caught between different rules to find themselves stateless.78” The basic presumption in customary international law on nationality in the context of state succession has usually been that nationality should follow habitual residence, “subject to a right in the new State to delimit more strengthened particularly by the who it will comprehensive regard Articles as its nationals”.28® on Nationality This of Natural presumption Persons Succession of States adopted in 1999 by the International Law Commission.”8° is restated in Relation and to the The Articles state that: Subject to the provisions of the present draft articles, persons concerned having their habitual residence in the territory affected by the succession of States are presumed to acquire the nationality of the successor State on the date of such succession. (Article 5) Further articles provide that states must take “all appropriate measures” to prevent statelessness arising from state succession (Article 4), and that persons shall not be denied the right to retain or acquire a nationality through discrimination “on any ground” (Article 15). 2% UN Human Rights Council Resolution 20/4: The right to a nationality: Women and children, A/HRC/RES/20/4, 16 July 2012 https://www.refworld.org/docid/503dd5422.html. 285 UN Human Rights Council Resolution 32/7: Women’s equal nationality rights in law and in practice, A/HRC/RES/32/7, 18 July 2016 https://www.refworld.org/docid/57e910044.htmi. 286 See resource page at: https://www.refworld.org/statelessness.html 287 Paul Weis, Nationality and Statelessness in International Law, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1979), chap. 11; Ruth Donner, The Regulation of Nationality in International Law (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y: Transnational Publishers Inc., 1994), chap. V; Laura van Waas, Nationality Matters: Statelessness under International Law (Antwerp ; Portland: Intersentia, 2008), chap. VI; Francesco Costamagna, ‘Statelessness in the Context of State Succession: An Appraisal under International Law’, in The Changing Role of Nationality in International Law, ed. Alessandra Annoni and Serena Forlati (Basingstoke: Routledge, 2013); Ineta Ziemele, ‘State succession and issues of nationality and statelessness’, in Nationality and Statelessness under International Law, ed. Alice Edwards and Laura van Waas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 288 James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law, 2. ed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 53. 289 International Law Commission, Draft Articles on Nationality of Natural Persons in relation to the Succession of States, with commentaries, 1999 (Annex to UNGA Res. 55/153, 12 Dec. 2000). 64 UNHCR — December 2021