710 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW [Vol. 105:694 foreigner only when she acquired the nationality of her husband.101 When children did not acquire the new nationality of naturalizing parents, the Convention provided that they would retain their original nationality, and a protocol to the Convention extended nationality to the child born in the territory of a state to a mother possessing the nationality of that state and a father not possessing such nationality.102 Not merely serving the bidding of states, these provisions accounted for individual interests in nationality. The rights perspective was made explicit in the wake of World War II, when statelessness became an acute issue. (It was in this context that Hannah Arendt delivered her dictum that all rights are national rights.)103 The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided that “[e]veryone has a right to nationality” and that “[n]o one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”104 With these strokes, the discourse shifted away from a order-centered orientation and recognized, instead, the individual’s interest in nationality to be a matter of international law.105 The discursive shift did not result in broadly actionable international norms. The Universal Declaration’s right to nationality was not designated as the obligation of any particular state to satisfy,106 and the declaration itself did not take the form of a binding legal instrument.107 When many of its protections were adopted in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to nationality, again without reference to any particular state, was scaled back to apply to children only.108 Prior to the Covenant, the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (Statelessness Convention) required contracting states to extend nationality to children born on their territory who would otherwise be stateless, as well as to children born to nationals outside the state’s territory who would otherwise be stateless.109 The absolute numbers here would have been small, except in the face of large, persistent refugee populations. Even so, the Convention attracted only twenty-five states parties, none of whose 101 Hague Convention on Nationality, supra note 16, Art. 8. Id., Art. 13. 103 HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM 267 (2d ed. 1973). 104 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, supra note 95, Art. 15. 105 See NEHEMIAH ROBINSON, THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: ITS ORIGIN, SIGNIFICANCE, APPLICATION, AND INTERPRETATION 123 (1958) (characterizing Article 15 as “a total innovation in the history of international law”). 106 See, e.g., LAURA VAN WAAS, NATIONALITY MATTERS: STATELESSNESS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW 41 (2008) (noting that these instruments “left vital questions such as ‘which nationality’ unanswered”); Ruth RubioMarı́n, Transnational Politics and the Democratic Nation-State: Normative Challenges of Expatriate Voting and Nationality Retention of Emigrants, 81 N.Y.U. L. REV. 117, 135 (2006); see also Johannes M. M. Chan, The Right to a Nationality as a Human Right, 12 HUM. RTS. L.J. 1, 3 (1991) (“As long as no State could be compelled to grant its nationality to the individual, the right to nationality is largely meaningless.”). Although Article 15 of the Universal Declaration had nowhere near the run-up as did the 1930 Hague Convention on Nationality, see supra notes 25– 46 and accompanying text, at least one prominent international law jurist had called for the pronouncement of a more concrete right to nationality. Much as James Brown Scott had done twenty years before, Hersch Lauterpacht advocated the adoption of jus soli as a rule of international law. See H. LAUTERPACHT, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS 315 (2d ed. 1950) (proposing language under which “[e]very person shall be entitled to the nationality of the State where he is born unless and until at majority he declares for the nationality open to him by virtue of descent”). 107 Hailbronner, supra note 20, at 37 (Universal Declaration did not “replace[] the traditional understanding of nationality as a sovereign prerogative of the state”). 108 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 24, Mar. 23, 1976, 999 UNTS 171 (“Every child has the right to acquire a nationality.”). 109 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, Art. 1, Aug. 30, 1961, 989 UNTS 175. 102 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