A note on terminology: “nationality” and “citizenship”
In international law, nationality and citizenship are now used as synonyms, to describe the legal
relationship between the state and the individual; the terms can — and will in this text — be used
interchangeably. Neither term has any connotation of ethnic or racial content, but is simply the status
that gives a person rights and obligations in relation to a particular state.
Other disciplines, such as political science or sociology, have different ways of using the terms in other
contexts. And even in law, different languages have different nuances, and different legal traditions
have different usages at national level. In national law, “citizenship” is the term used by lawyers in
the Commonwealth tradition to describe this legal bond, and the rules adopted at country level by
which it is decided whether a person does or does not have the right to legal membership of that state
and the status of a person who is a member. Nationality can be used in the same sense, but tends to
be more restricted to international law contexts. In the French 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 has a national citizenship act, a member of the Francophonie has a code de la
nationalité. Citoyenneté is not used in this context.
In the English text of this report the term “nationality of origin” is used as a direct translation from the
French nationalité d’origine to mean nationality that a person has from birth as of right. In many
Commonwealth countries, the term used in national laws for this concept is “citizenship by birth”;
however, the original meaning of citizenship by birth — citizenship attributed simply on the basis of
birth in the country (by contrast with citizenship by descent, for those born outside the country of a
citizen parent) — is no longer in force in any of the Commonwealth countries of West Africa, and the
phrase tends to create confusion.
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