This article discusses petitioners Dr. Roger C.S. Lin, Julian T.A. Lin, and the Taiwan Civil Government ("TCG") filing of a petition before the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a writ of certiorari in Lin vs. United States of America and Republic of China (Taiwan). TCG is an advocacy group which has represented thousands of individuals who lost their Japanese nationality in 1945. In its Petition,Lin vs. United States of America and Republic of China (Taiwan), the group seeks a declaratory judgment that a number of Nationality Decrees which denationalised Japanese people living in Taiwan at the end of World War
II—stripping them of Japanese nationality and rendering them stateless—are illegal and ineffective under
international law. In 2016, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia refused to grant the
request. The U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling of the District Court on two grounds: whether a
declaratory judgment can redress Taiwanese statelessness, and whether statelessness is a continuing violation
of international law for statute of limitations purposes.