The thousand paper cuts of oppressive nationality – a rejoinder As Jelena Džankić argues,344 in many cases, states would not be able to weaponise citizenship if they were not helped along by individuals who were minded, persuaded or compelled to make the strategic choice to accept the nationality on offer. Would an international law rule targeting state abuse then also end up targeting individual choice? Timothy Jacob-Owens raises a different, but no less serious, concern with respect to the potential impact of an international law of nationality on individual choice: 345states standing the concept of weaponised citizenship on its head to deny nationality rights to those who would have otherwise have legitimate claims to citizenship acquisition on remedial grounds. For Jacob-Owens, it would be virtually impossible for international law to be able to meaningfully distinguish between weaponised citizenship and reparative citizenship, inadvertently strengthening the hands of imperial states such as the United Kingdom that seek to delegitimise demands for remedial citizenship by formerly colonized groups such as the Chagos Islanders. Finally, Bronwen Manby and Ramesh Ganohariti highlight the risk that an international law of nationality that sanctions oppressive nationality would not only penalise the state responsible for the oppression but also those whom it oppresses.346 Pointing to measures such as the ban on dual citizenship and the non-recognition of passports and travel documents issued by the state weaponising citizenship, Ganohariti and Manby draw attention to the plight of the bearers of these documents who as a consequence find themselves with reduced rights to mobility and social welfare.347 I am grateful to these responses for foregrounding a vital issue that any international law of nationality must grapple with: how do we hold accountable the agent responsible for citizenship weaponisation rather than its recipients who may face constrained choices and compromised agency? One could argue that designing a sufficiently precise legal rule that is neither under-inclusive nor over-inclusive, to borrow Lior Erez’s terminology, is exactly what lawyers try to do all the time.348 No master drafter will be able to come up with an international rule that never fails to capture any instances that it should, or conversely, that never over-reaches in its zeal to be as comprehensive as possible. Like the rules of grammar, it is in the nature of legal rules to be fuzzy around the core with boundaries that may need to expand or contract through exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions, that are revealed only in the application of the rule to concrete cases. One can imagine approaching the development of an international law of nationality in one of two ways: as open-ended international law standards revolving around core questions of consent, sovereignty, human rights impacts, reparations, etc. that subsequently undergo rulification –– this would make my proposal for appropriate fora for adjudication all the more salient. Or one could have the bulk of the substantive choices on the balance to be struck between these concepts determined by drafters, such as treaty negotiators, with the adjudicator entrusted with interpretative freedom at the margins and in relation to the individual facts in issue. It is in the latter spirit that I read Ganohoriti’s three conditions for when international law should restrict oppressive nationality attribution349 and Bauböck’s proposal for a hierarchy of rules prioritising the territorial integrity and stability of a state over both the state’s prerogative to designate its nationals and individual consent to citizenship acquisition.350 Another possible option is to take a cue from international and regional human rights instruments that often have a broadly formulated right, e.g., the right to free speech, that is then subject to a series of exceptions, for example, the restrictions in the interests of public order, democratic values and so on. Which model would make sense for the international law of nationality would need to be worked out not just on the basis of abstract principles but also the resources that would be required for its practical implementation. 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 Džankić 2022. Jacob-Owens 2022. Manby 2023; Ganohariti 2022. Id. Erez 2023. Ganohariti 2022. Bauböck 2023. European University Institute 54