2011] AN INTERNATIONAL LAW OF CITIZENSHIP 719 rights treaty committees;161 and in state practice and its framing by international actors (multilateral,162 state, and nonstate).163 Assuming that human rights premises continue to pervade international law, these prospective norms are likely, and perhaps inevitably, to be advanced164 through both formal and discursive mechanisms.165 The trends are consistent with recent work on citizenship by leading political theorists—work that lends further credibility to the identification of emerging norms in the area. This section attempts to situate these developments in a coherent account.166 Second, the analysis is intended mostly as a positive account. To the extent that it is normative and itself works from human rights premises, the message is a cautionary one. An international law of citizenship will be rights reinforcing in the short and medium term. Citizenship status will continue to carry protective benefits, even if it no longer marks the dividing line between all rights and none.167 To the extent that international law requires the extension of limits on the broad powers enjoyed by states in that area, and that the manners in which States regulate matters bearing on nationality cannot today be deemed within their sole jurisdiction . . . . 161 See, e.g., supra text accompanying notes 237– 46 (describing treaty committee critiques of discriminatory birthright citizenship practices); see also Henry J. Steiner, Individual Claims in a World of Massive Violations: What Role for the Human Rights Committee, in THE FUTURE OF U.N. HUMAN RIGHTS TREATY MONITORING 16 (Philip Alston & James Crawford eds., 2000) (noting importance of the Human Rights Committee). 162 See generally ZIEMELE, supra note 139, at 63–72 (describing work of United Nations, Council of Europe, and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe regarding nationality practices of Latvia and Estonia); Goldston, supra note 119, at 342– 43 (suggesting that issues of citizenship access be mainstreamed into human rights reporting of UN human rights bodies). 163 Most notably among them, the Open Society Institute has focused on equality and justice in the context of naturalization and citizenship as part of an international migration initiative. See Open Society International Migration Initiative, at http://www.soros.org/initiatives/migration/focus_areas/equality-justice; see also MANBY, CITIZENSHIP LAW IN AFRICA, supra note 5 (Open Society Institute–sponsored study calling for citizenship law reforms); Goldston, supra note 119, at 322 (analysis calling for “clarification and articulation of new legal norms that narrow boundaries of state prerogative” over citizenship access by executive director of Open Society Institute Justice Initiative). 164 See, e.g., Eide, supra note 136, at 122 (“The regulation of citizenship in international law is therefore very much in the making, but the direction is clear.”). 165 For two recent works by political scientists arguing from case studies that international norms have been effectively deployed as a “political resource” by citizenship reformers in Germany and Japan, see Amy Gurowitz, International Norms: Domestic Actors, Immigrants, and the Japanese State, 51 WORLD POL. 413 (1999), and James D. Ingram & Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, Rights, Norms, and Politics: The Case of German Citizenship Reform, 77 SOC. RES. 353 (2010). Cf. Tara Melish, From Paradox to Subsidiarity: The United States and Human Rights Treaty Bodies, 34 YALE J. INT’L L. 390 (2009) (describing disaggregated mechanisms for incorporation of human rights norms into U.S. law). 166 Cf. Goldston, supra note 119, at 338 (noting that “a great deal remains to be clarified” regarding application of human rights to citizenship practice); Orentlicher, supra note 155, at 299 (noting that nationality-related issues surrounding independence of Baltic states “have laid bare a profound but heretofore largely subterranean shift in international legal doctrine governing matters of citizenship”). 167 See, e.g., Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44, 64 (1958) (Warren, C.J., dissenting) (“Citizenship is man’s basic right for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.”); see also SOKOLOFF, supra note 152, at 19 –22 (describing threat to basic rights of noncitizens); infra notes 317–21 and accompanying text. That said, the gap between citizen and noncitizen rights has narrowed considerably with the maturation of human rights regimes based on personhood rather than nationality. See generally DAVID WEISSBRODT, THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF NON-CITIZENS (2008); see also SPIRO, supra note 2, ch. 4 (describing near identity of rights and obligations for citizens and permanent resident aliens in the U.S. context); Rubenstein, supra note 10, at 171–72 (“The value of citizenship for political governance has been drastically reduced . . . . Citizenship is no longer legitimately the major foundation upon which rights are restricted and determined, even within the nation state.”). Parallel to efforts to improve access to citizenship are those aimed at enhancing the rights of noncitizens. See, e.g., Goldston, supra note 119 (linking the two). For one example of a minority group preferring the latter track, see Chikako Kashiwazaki, Citizenship in Japan: Legal Practice and Contemporary Development, in FROM MIGRANTS TO CITIZENS, supra note 5, at 434, 458 (recounting that the This content downloaded from 82.196.111.31 on Thu, 07 Oct 2021 15:20:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms