Dominicans of Haitian descent remain excluded from recognition of Dominican nationality.215 There is nonetheless a strong argument for the positive impact of the litigation overall.216 And the judgment has had transnational normative impacts, cited not only by subsequent decisions of the IACtHR, but also by national courts in the Americas217 and by the African and UN human rights treaty bodies.218 In the current international context, the normative gains that this litigation has helped to advance, including as the basis for codification in soft law and treaties, seem ever more fragile. States continue to carry out egregious campaigns of mass denationalisation, apparently with impunity.219 The second term of Donald Trump as US president has hyper-charged this tendency, including through a purported effort to end the constitutional right to citizenship based on birth in US territory.220 Nevertheless, if human rights lawyers continue to show deference to the position that ‘international law treats citizenship as a state’s prerogative, except where it leads to statelessness’,221 they are aligning themselves with what is now a quite conservative position; even if they go on to assert further desirable constraints around due process and discrimination. The moves towards establishing Nottebohm’s ‘social fact of attachment’ as a sufficient connection to require nationality to be recognised or granted, combine with more detailed guidelines on the procedural meaning of ‘arbitrary deprivation’, the increasing disapproval of both direct and indirect discrimination in nationality matters, the strengthened obligations in relation to the prevention of statelessness, and the expanded interpretation of the definition of ‘stateless person’ to create new legal baselines for expected State behaviour. Emphasis should be given to the road that has already been travelled towards Peter Spiro’s ‘new international law of citizenship’ rather than only regretting the distance still to go, lest it becomes harder to reach the destination. At least some of the holes in the rights framework have been filled, even as the work of patching up the gaps remains a constant—and ever more urgent—task. Acknowledgments. The first draft of this article was written as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) for the academic year 2022–2023; it draws on an evaluation 215 Amnesty International, ‘“Without Papers, I Am No One”: Stateless People in the Dominican Republic’ (2015); AJ Petrozziello, ‘Bringing the Border to Baby: Birth Registration as Bordering Practice for Migrant Women’s Children’ (2019) 27 Gender & Development 31; AJ Petrozziello, ‘Street-Level Bureaucrats Manufacturing Migrants: An Implementation Study of Policy Measures to Address Statelessness in the Dominican Republic’ (2025) 59 Social Policy & Administration 666. 216 B Wooding, ‘Supra-National Jurisprudence: Necessary but Insufficient to Contest Statelessness in the Dominican Republic’ in T Bloom and LN Kingston (eds), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press 2021); Bingham and Gamboa (n 200) 147–49. 217 e.g. Sentencia T-006/20 (Constitutional Court of Colombia). 218 Kenyan Nubian Children’s Case (n 46); ACJPS & PLACE v Sudan (n 48); DZ v the Netherlands (n 59); Faslliu v Albania (n 70). 219 e.g. Bahrain, Kuwait and Nicaragua: Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, Salam for Democracy and Human Rights and Hawiati MENA Statelessness Network, ‘Arbitrary Revocation of Nationality in Bahrain: A Tool of Oppression’ (2021); HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement et al, ‘Kuwaiti Government Must End Campaign of Mass Citizenship Stripping and Repeal Recent Amendments to Nationality Law’ (Minority Rights Group, 12 February 2025) <https://minorityrights.org/kuwait-citizenship-stripping/>; E Fripp, ‘The Resurgence of Large-Scale Deprivation of Nationality: The Case of Kuwait’ (Opinio Juris, 21 October 2025) <https://opiniojuris.org/2025/10/21/the-resurgence-of-large-scale-deprivation-of-nationality-the-case-ofkuwait/>; Human Rights Council, ‘Report of the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua’ (26 May 2025) UN Doc A/HRC/58/26. 220 Brennan Center for Justice, ‘Birthright Citizenship under the U.S. Constitution’ (December 2025); M Stewart, ‘Birthright Citizenship, Denaturalization, and the Specter of Statelessness’ (2026) 73 UCLA Law Review Discourse 170. 221 A Teffera, ‘German Proposal to Strip Citizenship Endangers Human Rights: Scrap Proposal to Remove German Citizenship from Dual Citizens’ (Human Rights Watch, 3 April 2025) <https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/04/03/german-proposal-strip-citizenship-endangers-human-rights>.