Book Review: Citizenship In the 1920s, the League of Nations issued documentation to hundreds of thousands of refugees and stateless persons dispersed throughout Europe in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and Armenian genocide. 42 While these ‘Nansen passports’ (named for the Norwegian diplomat appointed to handle refugee affairs) did not confer citizenship rights, they ‘protected individuals from deportation and extended re-entry rights’. 43 In the US, no citizen can lose citizenship against their will, adopting a default position in which persons retain US citizenship when naturalising in another country. 44 Some countries — such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark and Canada — have adopted measures to expatriate persons (usually dual nationals so as to avoid statelessness) implicated in terrorist activities. 45 This practice harkens back to the earliest principles allowing for expatriation on the basis of serving in hostile foreign forces, but risks of abuse and discrimination arguably outweigh the actual utility of preventing terrorism. 46 In recent years, Bahrain has terminated citizenship of hundreds of political dissidents for terrorism-related offenses. 47 According to Spiro, ‘[n]o country appears to expatriate individuals for common criminal activity’. 48 With respect to gender equality, the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women affirms nondiscrimination in the application of nationality laws, in contrast to the ‘nearuniversal practice’ prevailing in the nineteenth century of terminating the nationality of women who married foreign men. 49 In some cases, however, women can still lose their original citizenship if they naturalise in another state through marriage. 50 Spiro also provides in Chapter Five a concise and comprehensive overview of statelessness, ‘the condition in which an individual lacks formal citizenship in any country’. 51 He describes and provides examples of causes, such as conflict of nationality laws; state dissolution and state succession; and discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnicity or gender. He notes positive steps to combat statelessness, such as increased ratifications of statelessness treaties and stronger initiatives undertaken by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the last two decades. 52 Arguably missing is a rough sense of the extent of the problem of statelessness — the Institute of Statelessness and Inclusion estimates the number to be at least 15 million — and why states and international bodies 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 ibid 117. ibid 117–18. ibid 121. ibid. ibid 122–23. ibid 119. See also Fatiha Belfakir, ‘Activists: Bahrain Continues to Revoke Citizenship of Dissidents’, VOA News (6 November 2018) <https://www.voanews.com/extremismwatch/activists-bahrain-continues-revoke-citizenship-dissidents>. ibid 119. ibid 115; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, opened for signature 18 December 1979, 1249 UNTS 13 (entered into force 3 September 1981). ibid 117. ibid 129. ibid 133. 365