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citizenship on people’s lives, I do question whether this is an issue of ‘statelessness’, rather than an issue of ineffective citizenship itself. As will be argued
here, the enjoyment of certain ‘citizen’ rights, even to a level nearly as effective
as a citizen, does not make the legal bond of citizenship to a state redundant,
just as ineffective citizenship does not make a person stateless, as a legal bond
of citizenship remains. To highlight the centrality of this legal bond, this article
will look at the other side of the ineffective citizenship (de facto stateless) discourse, that of effective though not legal de facto citizenship.
2
De facto Citizenship from de facto Statelessness
If a person’s citizenship can become so ineffective that they become stateless
(thus warranting our concern), it would be reasonable to assume that a de jure
stateless person can receive such effective citizenship from a state that we
should consider them a de facto citizen (thus not warranting our concern).
Therefore, to slightly reword Blitz’s earlier justification of de facto statelessness, we can exclude the ‘countless others who can call upon their rights,
despite their lack of nationality, for their protection and are effectively citizens’. This would then allow us to move certain de jure stateless populations
out of our stateless population of concern, due to their effective citizenship of
a state.
The point at which a person becomes a de facto citizen is similarly ambiguous to the point at which a person becomes de facto stateless. To reflect this
diversity let us consider two examples where populations have been labelled
de facto stateless. First de facto statelessness has been used to describe the victims of hurricane Katrina in 2005.7 It is argued that the federal government’s
lack of response to the disaster was a reflection of wider trends of ineffective
citizenship of those who were not assisted, such as the poverty and social problems being faced by the residents, through the ‘stigmatizing venom of personal
blame and cries of dependent immorality’.8 As citizens with less effective citizenship then, their needs were not adequately addressed in their time of crisis,
compared to times when the government has come to the aid of those they
consider more valued citizens – who have, as a consequence, more effective
citizenship. Their citizenship was therefore shown to be ineffective during the
events surrounding hurricane Katrina. This understanding would include any
7 Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have
Rights (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies, Cambridge University 2008).
8 Ibid 11.
tilburg law review 19 (2014) 276-284