the right to dignity and legal status, the Commission has found violations of the right to participate in public affairs. For example, considering provisions inserted in 2000 into the constitution of Côte d’Ivoire that required the president both to be Ivorian by birth him or herself and to have parents who were both Ivorian by birth, the African Commission found that: [T]he requirement that an individual can only exercise the right to stand for the post of a President not only if he/she is born in Côte d’Ivoire, but also that his parents must be born in Côte d’Ivoire unreasonable and unjustifiable, and find this an unnecessary restriction on the right to participate in government guaranteed under Article 13 of the African Charter. [The constitutional provision] is also discriminatory because it applies different standards to the same categories of persons, that is persons born in Côte d’Ivoire are now treated based on the places of origin of their parents, a phenomenon which is contrary to the spirit of Article 2 of the African Charter.390 The right to family life The right to family life may be especially important as a foundation for litigation in jurisdictions where the right to nationality is not explicitly protected—for example, in litigation before the European Court of Human Rights. Although the European Court of Human Rights has declined to find that the right to nationality is implied within the provisions of the European Convention,391 it does consider that denial of nationality may in some contexts violate the right to family life. In the case of Genovese v. Malta, relating to discrimination in transmission of nationality based on birth in or out of wedlock, the Court stated:  Even in the absence of family life, the denial of citizenship may raise an issue under Article 8 because of its impact on the private life of an individual, which concept is wide enough to embrace aspects of a person’s social identity. While the right to citizenship is not as such a Convention right and while its denial in the present case was not such as to give rise to a violation of Article 8, the Court considers that its impact on the applicant’s social identity was such as to bring it within the general scope and ambit of that Article.392 This position was reaffirmed in the case of Mennesson v. France.393 A number of other cases before the European Court have touched on similar principles, albeit focused on stable residence rights rather than specifically calling for grant of nationality.394  In the case of Kurić v. Slovenia, the Court ruled that the “erasure” of the registration of a group of stateless persons as residents and the destruction of their identity documents had “deprived the applicants of their legal status” and accordingly violated their right to private and family life.395  In Hoti v. Croatia, a case brought by a stateless person of Albanian descent unable to regularise his status in Croatia over 40 years, the European Court of Human Rights determined that the complainant was in fact stateless, expressed its surprise that the Croatian authorities had not done the same, and found a violation of Article 8.396  In a similar case from Hungary, the Court stated that Hungary had not “complied with its positive obligation to provide an effective and accessible procedure ... enabling the applicant to have the issue of his status in Hungary determined with due regard to his private life interests under Article 8.”397 The European Network on Statelessness and the AIRE Centre have published a legal briefing with guidance on states’ obligations under the European Convention to protect the right to respect for private and family life of stateless persons.398 390 MIDH v. Côte d’Ivoire supra n 299, para. 86. The Court will not, for example, insist on grant of nationality as a solution for a stateless person threatened with deportation as a non-citizen, so long as a regularized residence status is available enabling family life to be protected. Sisojeva and Others v. Latvia, Application no. 60654/00, European Court of Human Rights, Grand Chamber, Judgment of 15 January 2007, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-79022. 391 392 Genovese v. Malta, Application no. 53124/09, European Court on Human Rights, Judgment of 11 October 2011, para. 33, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-106785. 393 Mennesson v. France, supra n 162, para. 97. 394 See also the summaries in the Litigation Toolkit on Statelessness for Legal Practitioners, Volume 2, European Network on Statelessness and AIRE Centre, 2022. 395 Kurić and Others v. Slovenia, supra n 133; see also Smirnova v. Russia, application no. 46133/99 and 48183/99, European Court of Human Rights, 24 July 2003). Hoti v. Croatia, supra n 132; case summary at: https://caselaw.statelessness.eu/caselaw/ecthr-hoti-v-croatia; Katja Swider, “Hoti v. Croatia—a Landmark Decision by the European Court of Human Rights on Residence Rights of a Stateless Person (blog post), European Network on Statelessness, 3 May 2018, https://www.statelessness.eu/updates/blog/hoti-v-croatia-landmark-decision-european-court-human-rights-residence-rights. 396 397 Sudita Keita v. Hungary (application no. 42321/15), European Court of Human Rights, judgment of May 12, 2020. Case summary at: https://caselaw.statelessness.eu/caselaw/ecthr-sudita-keita-v-hungary. 398 “Legal briefing: Statelessness and the right to respect for family and private life”, European Network on Statelessness and the AIRE Centre (Centre for Advice on Individual Rights in Europe), October 2024, https://www.statelessness.eu/updates/publications/legal-briefing-statelessness-and-right-respect-family-and-private-life. 86 U N H C R | L I T I G AT I N G T H E R I G H T T O A N AT I O N A L I T Y: A G U I D E F O R P R AC T I T I O N E R S