Weaponised Citizenship: Should international law restrict oppressive nationality attribution? While the genuine link doctrine as introduced by the ICJ in the Nottebohm case does not assess the formal status or validity of citizenship allocation for the purposes of domestic law and is limited to the issue of diplomatic protection,6 it has gradually been transplanted to other areas of international law, with some scholars arguing that it has morphed into a general principle regulating the recognition of nationality.7 These skeletal norms on non-recognition, however, have not served as a barrier to states allocating citizenship in order to circumvent yet other, stronger, international legal norms –– those that govern statelessness and refugee protection. One example of this practice can be found in Noora Lori’s incisive account of “offshoring citizenship” in the UAE.8 Billed as a temporary documentation measure to “regularise” the status of its long-term resident minorities, the scheme involved the launching of a statelessness registration drive by the UAE Ministry of Interior whereby stateless individuals and those with pending naturalisation applications were issued stateless identity cards. These individuals, comprising various domestic minorities who in some cases had resided in the UAE for generations but had never been granted crucial identity documents, were then issued with stateless ID cards and passports bought by the UAE from the Union of Comoros, one of the world’s poorest countries. Individuals with this zombie Comorian citizenship have no pre-existing ties to Comoros; nor does this citizenship entitle them to what are considered key attributes of the status: the right to enter and reside in the country and to call upon it for diplomatic protection (that could in any case be challenged under the Nottebohm ruling). However, the artificial attribution of the citizenship of Comoros enables the UAE to avoid having to explicitly deny these individuals Emirati citizenship and the formal statelessness that would ensue. Another instance of a zombie citizenship is invoked by Audrey Macklin’s illuminating discussion of “sticky citizenship” that she describes as ‘situations where a state seeks to stick citizenship on an unwilling recipient or where an individual is stuck with a citizenship she wishes to disavow.’9 Macklin draws on case studies of refugee claims in Australia and Canada by Jewish asylum seekers from the former Soviet Union and attempts by the UK government to revoke the citizenship of terrorist suspects to argue that, in both cases, the attribution of a putative citizenship functions to enable states to circumvent their international human rights law obligations. In the former case, Israel’s Law of Return has been interpreted so as to turn all Jews into virtual Israeli citizens. This, in turn, would defeat their claim to surrogate protection due to a well-founded fear of persecution from (each) state of nationality on the basis that they would still be eligible for protection from the Israeli state. In the latter case, the Home Office has sought to argue that an individual who would be eligible for and could obtain the citizenship of another state (such as Iraq, of which the individual was formerly a national) would not be rendered stateless on account of denationalisation by the UK. What is striking about these forms of zombie citizenship is that the state that is engaged in engineering the attribution is not the same as the state whose nationality is being ascribed. While in the case of offshore citizens, it is unclear that there is any consent, real or contrived, that is obtained from the newly minted Comorian citizens, sticky citizenship cases of the kind Macklin highlights do seek to peddle a form of consent: the putative citizen may “voluntarily” apply to be a citizen of the state where they are formally eligible to become nationals. In all cases, the individual stands to lose the protection of the international law of asylum and statelessness while acquiring either little to no substantive citizenship rights, or entirely speculative ones. 6 7 8 9 Nottebohm, Liechtenstein v Guatemala, Preliminary Objection (Second phase), Judgment, [1955] ICJ Rep 4, ICGJ 185 (ICJ 1955). Sloane R. (2009), ‘Breaking the Genuine Link: The Contemporary International Legal Regulation of Nationality’, 50 Harvard International Law Journal 1; Brownlie I. (2003), Principles of International Law, 6th edn., Oxford University Press. Lori N. (2019), Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf, Cambridge University Press (hereinafter ‘Lori 2019’). Howard-Hassmann R. and Walton-Roberts M. (2015), The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept, University of Pennsylvania Press (hereinafter Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts 2015’). European University Institute 2