On the Right to Have Nationality Rights: Statelessness,… 305 To illustrate this point, consider two types of example. The first is a policy of creating difficulties for members of particular ethnic groups to obtain a nationality to which they are entitled. As Bronwen Manby notes of Africa: ‘In practice, individual Africans far more often face the practical impossibility of obtaining official documentation than an explicit legal denial of nationality’.17 Stories of the difficulty of obtaining, for example, passports are widespread in African states and typically exhibit an ethnically patterned character.18 It is worth noting the example of Kenya since, in this state, the value of a birth certificate is undermined by the fact that the certificate explicitly state that it has no standing with respect to nationality determination. In the quest for identity cards or passports, which are necessary to vote, ‘Kenyan Somalis, Nubians and others faced demands for bribes of complete refusal to grant documentation’.19 Similar difficulties are confronted by the Roma in Europe.20 The second type of example is a state practice of responsibility-avoidance that construes the constraint of complying with international norms governing the reduction of de jure statelessness in such a way as to avoid its effective operation and is also salient in relation to the UNHCR’s current campaign. This example is drawn from research in Malaysia conducted by Catherine Allerton who notes the UNHCR campaign focuses on measures such as ‘birth registration and the reform of nationality laws, in particular, so that otherwise stateless children can acquire the nationality of the state in which they were born’21 before remarking: In Malaysia, it would seem that no such legal reform is needed. Although the country subscribes to a jus sanguinis principle of citizenship, there are clear legal provisions to protect the status of otherwise stateless children. The federal constitution allows for a child born in Malaysia, who is ‘not born as citizen of another country’, and who cannot acquire citizenship of another country by registration within 1 year of birth, to become a citizen of Malaysia by operation of law. However, in reality, Malaysian citizenship has never been granted to a child on such terms.22 Allerton’s point is that in contexts such as Malaysia what is fundamentally at issue is not the letter of the law but the practice of the law which appears, under its operation, to be designed both to avoid the responsibility that arises with the recognition of a child as de jure stateless and in doing so to support a particular and exclusive conception of Malay national community. The entanglement of statelessness, nationality rights and governmental conceptions of national community will be a recurring theme in this essay and points to a central issue for the question of the right to have the right to a nationality, namely, that establishing the right to have the right to a nationality is not simply a matter of 17 Manby (2009), p. 115. See Manby (2009), pp. 116–117. 19 Manby (2009), p. 120. 20 Sardelic (2015). 21 Allerton (2017), p. 250. 22 Allerton (2017), pp. 250–251. 18 123