S888 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL LAW [56:S855 Bosniak suggests that, as a normative matter, the right to a nationality, or to a citizenship, should be secondary to recognition of robust universal personhood, instantiated socially and politically. 220 Her interpretation of human rights, which moves beyond the citizen-centric model discussed by Marshall, focuses on imputing dignity to Arendt’s “abstract nakedness of being human.” 221 C. Contemporary State Practice and Opinio Juris UNHCR’s and scholars’ assertion that nationality can be equated with enfranchised citizenship contravenes the earlier understandings of nationality outlined in Sections I and II. Zilbershats’s assertion that the UDHR recognized the “right to a citizenship” glosses over the debates recorded in the UDHR’s travaux préparatoires showing that the drafters emphatically did not articulate the right to a citizenship. To determine if the right to a citizenship crystallized at some point in the 1990s, it is necessary to consider contemporary State practice and opinio juris. 1. State Practice Today, few States have laws that clearly create multiple classes of nationals, or that distinguish between citizen and non-citizen nationals. Most notable among the States that continue to distinguish between citizens and non-citizen nationals are the United States and United Kingdom. American Samoans, despite a slew of legal challenges, 222 are not entitled to and do not receive U.S. birthright citizenship; they are disenfranchised in federal elections and have no federal representation in the U.S. legislature. Unlike individuals born in one of the United States’ fifty states, those born to non-citizen parents in U.S. unincorporated territories receive, at most, statutory citizenship, which the U.S. Congress can withdraw through subsequent legislative action. British Protected Persons, individuals who acquired their status under a former British protectorate or trust territo220. Linda Bosniak, Persons and Citizens in Constitutional Thought, 8 ICON 9, 10, 26 (2010). 221. Id. at 26; see HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM 295 (1951). (“The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships [including nationality]—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human”). 222. See, e.g., Tuaua v. United States, 788 F.3d 300 (D.C. Cir. 2015). Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2954729