Shifting Borders of Belonging 25 person should have a nationality,”5 and it did not permit the loss of citizenship unless (or until such time that) a person acquired another one. Only a few years later, the 1933 Montevideo Declaration articulated that one of the criteria for statehood was the existence of a permanent population. This permanent population became the citizenry. Later United Nations human rights treaties6 would institute the significance of citizenship through the establishment of a human right to a nationality.7 Citizenship is so important from an international legal framework that no right to be voluntarily stateless (without citizenship) exists; states are not allowed to deprive an individual of citizenship arbitrarily; and states are prohibited from allowing their citizens to become charges on other states. Citizenship is thus much more than a conduit for rights access. It is the basis upon which states formally set the borders of belonging and through which they are able to conduct what Ceciliano-Navarro, Golash-Boza, and Rubén González call a “global apartheid” in Chapter 6. Despite the importance of citizenship as an international ordering principle, no international organization exists, whether as creator, arbiter, or enforcer, of citizenship laws for any state. Instead, the state has the “reserve domain,” or final say, on whether to grant, deny, or revoke citizenship, and on crafting the laws, processes, and legal institutions under which a person is deemed to be a citizen. It is within this “sovereign” space that the gap between the international human right to citizenship and its enjoyment in practice is most evident. In general, there are two main ways to acquire citizenship globally: by birth and, to a lesser extent, through naturalization. Birthright citizenship can be obtained (a) by being born within a state or its territories (jus soli) or (b) by being born to a parent who has a particular citizenship (jus sanguinis). All countries around the world offer a form of jus soli or jus sanguinis citizenship, but not all provide it absolutely. Exceptions vary. In the jus soli arena, for example, states exclude birthright citizenship to children born of foreign diplomats. And in places such as the Dominican Republic, children born in the country to parents who are classified as “in transit,” 5 6 7 Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law, July 1, 1937, 179 L.N.T.S. 89. Articles 5–7 of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, August 30, 1961, 989 U.N.T.S. 175, https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/6_1_1961.pdf, also reiterate these principles. Citizenship and nationality are used interchangeably in this text, as is the practice in much of the literature on citizenship and statelessness. United Nations treaties that address the right to a nationality include the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, December 21, 1965, 660 U.N.T.S. 195, art. 5; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, December 16, 1966, 999 U.N.T.S. 171, art. 24; the Convention on the Rights of the Child, November 20, 1989, 1577 U.N.T.S. 3, art. 7; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, December 18, 1979, 124 U.N.T.S. 13, art. 9; the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, December 18, 1990, A/RES/45/158, art. 29; and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, January 24, 2007, A/RES/61/106, art. 18. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press