Implementing the Right of Return Is an Obligation Owed by a State to
All Other States
Under the law of nationality, the duty to implement the individual’s right of return is
an obligation owed by a state to all other states. The rule is that states are required to
readmit (i.e., allow to exercise their right of return) their own nationals - including
temporarily displaced persons in cases of state succession - because to refuse to do so
would impose on some other state a resulting obligation to receive, or to host, the
rejected individual. This principle is known as the “rule of readmission.” The rule
rests upon the premise that a state may not choose to reject, or leave stranded, a
national outside its borders by refusing readmission because such an action would
impose an unacceptable corresponding burden upon another (receiving) state to accept
the stranded individual. Under international law, states may not burden each other in
this way.
The Prohibition against (Mass) Denationalization
There exists another customary (binding) rule under the law of nationality
known as the “prohibition against denationalization.” This rule follows as a
natural corollary to the rule of readmission, already discussed above. The
prohibition against denationalization prevents a state from using revocation of
nationality status (i.e., denationalization) as a means of avoiding its obligation to
admit its own nationals. This rule – like the rule of readmission, which is its
“sister” rule in the law of nationality – had attained customary status well before
the events of 1948. The prohibition against denationalization exists in an
authoritative draft international convention dating from 1930[20], various
regional declarations (such as the 1986 Strasbourg Declaration on the Right to
Leave and Return), in resolutions by UN organs[21], and numerous respected
commentators have written of the prohibition against denationalization as a
binding norm of customary law since as early as 1927. The entry for
“Population, Expulsion and Transfer” in the authoritative Encyclopedia of
Public International Law puts the rule categorically, stating that nationals may
not be denied re-admission on the rationale that they are no longer nationals.
Denationalization is prohibited under international law in the case of a single instance
affecting a single person. The prohibition against denationalization is therefore much
stronger when denationalization is implemented on a mass scale and is intended by
the government so acting, to cast out a whole large class of nationals from the body
politic of the state. Israel’s 1952 Nationality Law (for “non-Jews”) completely
violates the rule of the law of nationality prohibiting denationalization. While the
1952 Nationality Law carefully avoids the use of the term “non-Jew” in describing the
narrowly defined[22] categories of persons who might be eligible for Israeli citizenship
thereunder, it was clearly intended to apply to non-Jews only because Jews would
obviously avail themselves of the easier terms and procedures under the Law of
Return (for Jews).[23] The vast majority of Palestinian refugees are factually incapable