2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) 2008 Nationality Law as amended: ‘[s]tateless persons who do not have adequate personal identification papers but have been stably residing in the Vietnamese territory for 20 years or more by the effective date of this Law and obey Vietnam’s Constitution and laws will be permitted for naturalisation in Vietnam under the order, procedures and dossiers specified by the Government’. According to the UNHCR’s evaluation of the 2008 Nationality Law, this enabled naturalisation ‘to resolve the protracted statelessness situation affecting thousands of former Cambodian refugees’ living in Vietnam for many years. 130 The UNHCR found that within a few years, at least 2,300 former Cambodian refugees had been naturalised or were in the process of being naturalised as Vietnamese citizens. 131 In this way, Vietnam specifically addressed one of the ‘administrative obstacles to nationality’ in accordance with UNHCR’s statelessness mandate. The second issue concerned women marriage migrants who became de jure stateless under Taiwan’s laws on naturalisation, which required them to renounce their nationality prior to being processed for naturalisation in Taiwan. 132 This issue had been noted in a study of media reports by 2006: Every day, the Department of Citizenship Management (Ministry of Justice) receives many documents from Vietnamese girls who apply to give up their Vietnamese citizenship [these women are not entitled to dual citizenship]. It creates great anguish to see that forty thousand Vietnamese girls so easily renounce the citizenship that attaches them to their homeland … However, many girls, after giving up Vietnamese citizenship, break up with their husbands, get divorced, and are denied citizenship of their destination country. They then become persons without any citizenship. 133 In 2008 art 23(1)(f) was added to the 2008 Nationality Law, to enable a person who has renounced Vietnamese nationality to acquire foreign nationality, but who has failed to acquire foreign nationality, to apply to restore his or her Vietnamese nationality. The UNHCR notes that as of 2012, some 2,000 returned marriage migrants had ‘successfully reacquired Vietnamese [n]ationality’ pursuant to this provision. 134 The UNHCR especially commended Vietnam for ‘addressing statelessness among former Vietnamese women, who had renounced Vietnamese nationality in order to acquire foreign nationality of their husband, but failed to obtain the new nationality and became stateless’. 135 In these two scenarios, the 2008 Nationality Law went further than its predecessors in addressing the condition of de jure statelessness. Further, when defects in the 2008 Nationality Law were exposed (it imposed a five year time limit on applying for restoration of Vietnamese nationality, which many women for good reasons were unable to meet), the Vietnamese government amended the law in 2013 to remove the restriction. 136 However, as explained below, the 2008 Nationality Law did not deal with the current situation of children 130 131 132 133 UNHCR Submission 2013 (n 126) 3. ibid. Kneebone, ‘Transnational Marriage Migrants and Nationality’, (n 9). Bélanger, Hong and Linh, (n 114), citing Dương Hải, ‘Vỡ mộng cô dâu ngoại’ [Disillusioned about Foreign Brides] Labor Online (30 December 2010). 134 UNHCR Submission 2013 (n 126) 3. 135 ibid. 136 (No 56/2014/QH13, 26 February 2014) (Vietnam), adjusting and supplementing some articles of the 2008 Nationality Law (n 69). 92