2020
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
2(1)
a mechanism for the identification of their beneficiaries. 147 While for many
decades, states have granted refugee status through refugee status determination
procedures, a similar commitment is required to develop SDPs.
In this article, we have put forward a number of conditions that SDPs should
meet, and we applied these conditions to Nigeria, which is in the process of
developing an SDP. We conclude that Nigeria, and in fact any state which has or
does not yet have an SDP, may want to give particular attention to standards
relating to legality and ‘bindingness’ of the proposed SDP, to procedural access
and to procedural guarantees. SDPs meeting these criteria will make a significant
contribution to the protection, identification, prevention and eradication of
statelessness worldwide. It remains that bespoke SDP procedures ought to be
developed for individual states, as the effectiveness of such procedures depends
on their embeddedness in, and relationship to existing institutions. In this article,
we have suggested some tailor-made solutions for Nigeria in this respect.
147 Swider and den Heijer (n 12) 109.
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