Syrian Citizenship Disappeared In September 2013, during the weekly cabinet meeting, the Syrian Council of Ministers ratified a “draft law to exempt those who were granted the Syrian nationality -according to the provisions of Legislative Decree No. 49 of 2011 on granting the Syrian nationality to the Kurdsfrom the 5-year period condition to acquire the citizenship”.60 15. Between two decrees, 49 years of continuous agony: 15.1 The right to a nationality Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality. Article 15 Universal Declaration of Human Rights Everyone has the right to nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily or unlawfully deprived of his nationality. Article 29 Arab Charter on Human Rights 15.1.1 The right to a nationality, a basic human rights The concept of nationality emerged with the rise of international law, traditionally dated back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, as a result of the rise of international order. First meant to regulate relationships between states, nationality started impacting individuals only later, with the rise of human rights.61 60 Sawsan Zakzak,”Kurds of Syria 1962-2011: The Long Road from Census to Citizenship”, Legal Agenda, 30 December 2015, see: http://legal-agenda.com/en/article.php?id=3117 (Last visit: 6 August 2018). 61 Alice Edwards and Laura van Waas, “Introduction,” in Nationality and statelessness under international law eds Alice Edwards and Laura van Waas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) It became one of the first rights to be proclaimed, as part of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the elementary human rights instrument encompassing general principles of law, and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) later reaffirmed the rights for children to acquire a nationality. Regional instruments joined the movement and enshrined the right to a nationality, such as the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights or the 2004 Arab Charter on Human Rights (ACHR).62 Two international conventions address statelessness in particular, the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and 1961 the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. The prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of nationality, that is based on discrimination, is therefore considered a general principle of international law.63 In its 1996 report, Human Rights Watch demonstrated the arbitrariness of the campaign of denationalisation, that was part of a broader campaign of arabisation of northeast Syria by successive Arab nationalist governments. The conditions of the census, presented as aiming at “eliminating alien infiltrators” from the civil registers, reveal that the procedure was used to deprive large numbers of Syrian Kurds from their nationality. The census was, indeed conducting in the Al Hasakah province, known for being home of a large Kurdish population, and required residents to prove that they had lived in Syria at least since 1945 during a single day, meaning that anyone not being able to join was systematically deprived of their nationality. Additionally, the level of documentation required to certify one’s nationality went to such extent that it constituted obstacles to their registra62 Article 5 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), Article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Article 29.1 of the Arab Charter on Human Rights (2004) 63 Alice Edwards, “The meaning of nationality” in Nationality and statelessness under international law eds Alice Edwards and Laura van Waas (Cambridge: Cam� bridge University Press, 2014);Jorunn Brandvoll, “Depri�vation of nationality: Limitations on rendering persons stateless under international law,” in Nationality and statelessness under international law eds Alice Edwards and Laura van Waas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 21