Accordingly, the American Convention not only recognizes nationality as a human right, but creates a safeguard for children who would otherwise be stateless, by requiring the state in which the child is born to grant nationality based on jus soli. Furthermore, by ensuring the right to change nationality and prohibiting arbitrary deprivation of nationality, the American Convention establishes limits to the states’ discretion.55 Eight years after the adoption of the ACHR and a year before it came into force, the Inter-American Commission issued the Third Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Chile, which took a robust interpretation of nationality rights: This right [to nationality] is properly considered to be one of the most important rights of man, after the right to life itself, because all the prerogatives, guarantees and benefits man derives from his membership in a political and social community—the State—stem from or are supported by this right. Because of its unique nature, there is almost no country in the world where the law uses or applies loss of nationality as a penalty or sanction for any kind of crime, much less for activities of a political nature. It is generally considered that since nationality of origin is an inherent attribute of man, his natural right, and is not a gift or favor bestowed through the generosity or benevolence of the State, the State may neither impose it on anyone by force, nor withdraw it as punishment or reprisal.56 The Commission further noted that nationality rights protected interstate relations: The deprivation of nationality ... always has the effect of leaving a citizen without a land or home of his own, forcing him to take refuge in an alien country. That is, it inevitably impinges on another jurisdiction, and no state may take upon itself the power to adopt measures of this sort. … The Commission believes that this penalty—anachronistic, outlandish and legally unjustifiable in any part of the world—is a thousand times more odious and reprehensible when applied in our own Americas, and should forever be banned from being applied by governments everywhere.57 The Inter-American Court of Human Rights defined nationality in an advisory opinion in 1984: The political and legal bond that links a person to a given state and binds him to it with ties of loyalty and fidelity, entitling him to diplomatic protection from that state.58 BORN IN THE AMERICAS 31