36 RAMADAN v. MALTA JUDGMENT – SEPARATE OPINION international treaties40, States parties to the Convention have a negative obligation not to decide on the loss of citizenship if the person would thereby become stateless and a positive obligation to provide its citizenship for stateless persons, at least when they were born – or found in the case of a foundling – in their respective territories, or when one of their parents is a citizen41. The creation and perpetuation of situations of statelessness should be avoided at any cost in a civilised Europe. The marriage annulment in 1998 12. The Government argued that the applicant had to prove the existence of private and family life at the time when the grounds for the deprivation of citizenship had materialised, namely 16 January 1998 42. The applicant countered that the relevant moment was the interference with his Article 8 right, namely 31 July 2007, date of the ministerial order of revocation of citizenship43. In any event, he insisted that his first marriage had not been a fraud and that the judgment of 1998 should not have been relied upon44. The majority do not address the issue of the temporal scope of the case explicitly, but implicitly indulge in several considerations correlating the two decisions, even stating that “the situation complained of came about as a result of the applicant’s fraudulent behaviour”45. 13. I find this approach unfortunate, since the interference with the applicant’s Article 8 right to private and family life only occurred with the issuance of the ministerial order revoking his citizenship. In any event, I have the strongest doubts as to the legal and logical soundness of the annulment decision, in view of the simple fact that marriages of 40. The message of Genovese, cited above, § 44, must be repeated loud and clear: “The Court further observes that in searching for common ground among the norms of international law it has never distinguished between sources of law according to whether or not they have been signed or ratified by the respondent State (see Demir and Baykara v. Turkey [GC], no. 34503/97, § 78, ECHR 2008).” 41. Obligations to grant nationality to children born in the territory of a State and that would otherwise be stateless are also contained in Article 1 of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, Article 20 (2) of the American Convention on Human Rights, Article 6 (4) of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, Article 7 of the Covenant on the Rights of the Child in Islam, and Article 6 (2) of the European Convention on Nationality. Similar provisions contained in Article 2 of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, Article 7 (3) of the Covenant on the Rights of the Child in Islam and Article 6 (1) (b) of the European Convention on Nationality also guarantee the right to a nationality to children of unknown descent. 42. See paragraph 80 of the judgment. 43. See paragraph 68 of the judgment. 44. See paragraph 66 of the judgment. 45. See paragraph 89 of the judgment.