300 D. Owen was a condition of meaningful possession of human rights, and her tantalising invocation of ‘a right to have rights’ may seem as if they belong to an era that has been superseded by these developments.1 Although the development of the international human rights regime began slowly and was only in its earliest days at the point that Arendt’s reflection were written, it accelerated from the mid-1970s not least because of the efforts of nongovernmental organisations which, in coalition with smaller democracies, significantly contributed to ‘the institutionalization of legally binding accountability structures over the course of the 1980s and 1990 s’.2 However, despite ‘the momentous development of the international system for protection of human rights since World War II, the citizenship of a person determines how she is treated by this system; the rights people effectively have are still generally determined with a reference to the country they belong to’.3 In this context, the challenge of Arendt’s reflections on statelessness, citizenship and human rights remains salient, and although my concern in this essay is not with the interpretation of Arendt, the central topic that I do address may be seen, I hope, as responding to the spirit of her enquiry. This topic is the predicaments of nationality rights in our contemporary political context (where this encompasses the right to a nationality, the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of one’s nationality, the right to change one’s nationality and, relatedly, what we may term ‘the right to naturalisation’). I take up this topic because central to the post-war response to the condition addressed by Arendt was the focus on securing human rights to possession, maintenance and change of nationality. Here it may be helpful to cite a remark of Arendt’s: Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals.4 1 These developments would include the development of UN Charter-based system for supporting human rights, but perhaps more significantly the UN treaty-system which began with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), followed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966, before focusing on less generic themes and groups such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979); the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989); the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (1990); and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006). With the adoption of an Optional Protocol to ICESCR in 2008, the UN treaty system aims to uphold the principle that all rights are justiciable. To this can be added regional developments such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights to take the most developed example. 2 Simmons (2009), p. 51. 3 Bauböck and Paskalev (2015), p. 49. 4 Arendt (1958), p. 301. 123