Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2021 3(1) inaccessible when such a person is not qualified as a ‘national’ of some state. 21 This section first explores how the right to nationality has been understood as the right to have rights and then draws out the meaning of the obligation not to render persons stateless under international law. A The Right to Nationality as the Right to Have Rights Arendt calls nationality the ‘right to have rights and a right to belong to some kind of organised community’ and calls the loss of polity an ‘expulsion from humanity’. 22 Arendt points out that stateless persons without the right to have rights become rightless and lose their right to have a place in the world, lose their political status and the consequent protection of a government. 23 Furthermore, according to Arendt, with the loss of a community and a polity, a person loses human dignity and is expelled from humanity. 24 Accordingly, based on Arendt’s conception of nationality as the right to have rights, a person without nationality is without membership in a political community and without dignity. This means that firstly, the right to have rights is a right to membership in a political community. So, the enjoyment of other rights depends on membership within the state even if such rights were human rights that accord to people on account of their human nature. Alison Kesby expands on Arendt’s conception of the right to have rights and explains how it is the national that can enter and reside in a state and in this sense has a ‘place in the world’. 25 She notes that nationality is ‘a necessary legal status for the exercise of … the full range of human rights’. 26 Carol Batchelor describes it as ‘a necessary precursor to the exercise of other rights’. 27 Kristin Henrard echoes Arendt’s idea when she notes that citizenship is ‘membership of a polity, of a political community, and thus revolves around questions of inclusion and — as the other side of the coin — exclusion’. 28 Such membership ‘makes the person possessing [citizenship] deserving of the rights, and entitlements contingent on membership’. 29 While the very idea of human rights is to accord human beings basic rights on account of their humanity rather than a state’s will, despite being human stateless persons fall through the cracks and end up without rights. 30 This is why Arendt argues that the deprivation of the right to live happens after the right to have rights is taken away. 31 In fact, United Nations human rights treaty bodies note the obstacles persons without nationality face in enjoying human rights, thus confirming the right to 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Kingston (n 14) 26. Arendt (n 13) 296–97. ibid 293–94. ibid 297. Alison Kesby, The Right to Have Rights: Citizenship, Humanity, and International Law (Oxford University Press 2012) 16. ibid 52. Carol A Batchelor, ‘Statelessness and the Problem of Resolving Nationality Status’ (1998) 10(1) International Journal of Refugee Law 156, 159. Kristin Henrard, ‘The Shifting Parameters of Nationality’ (2018) 65(3) Netherlands International Law Review 269, 271. ibid 276. See Amy Lind and Marianne H Marchand, Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships, and Identities in Transnational Perspective (Routledge 2016) 67–68. Arendt (n 13) 295–96. 190