The right to a nationality is recognized in numerous international legal agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which in its article 15 stipulates that “everyone has the right to a nationality. No one will be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality or the right to change his nationality ”.
The decision taken by President Daniel Ortega to strip 317 people critical of his government of their Nicaraguan nationality, after declaring them this week "traitors to the homeland", has hardly any precedent in the world in recent decades and may contravene the international legal system .
The American Convention on Human Rights (1969), which entered into force in 1978 and was signed by 23 countries, including Nicaragua, establishes in Article 20, on the Right to Nationality, that "everyone has the right to a nationality of the State in whose territory he was born if he does not have the right to another" and "no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality or the right to change it". The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) is the body in charge of ensuring the application of this convention.
The Convention adopted by the United Nations to reduce cases of statelessness, which entered into force in 1975, also addresses the issue of withdrawal of nationality and, after establishing in its article 7 that "the national of a State may not lose his nationality if, upon losing it, they have to become stateless”, Article 9 states that States “shall not deprive any person or any group of persons of their nationality, for racial, ethnic, religious or political reasons”.
However, this Convention establishes (Article 8) some exceptions that allow States to deprive of nationality, among them "conducting themselves in a manner seriously prejudicial to the essential interests of the State" or "given decisive evidence of their determination to repudiate the loyalty that owes to the Contracting State”.
In the event that the State decides to withdraw nationality, the Convention emphasizes that the interested party "could make use of all his means of defense before a court or any other independent body".
After World War I was declared and for the next two decades, several European countries took measures to deprive citizens of their nationality who they considered to have carried out “anti-national acts” or in favor of the enemy. The first was France in 2015 and Belgium followed.
Earlier, in 1926, the Italian fascist regime promulgated a law against citizens who had shown themselves "unworthy of Italian citizenship" and on July 4, 1933, the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler, among the many laws that discriminated against Jews, passed the Law on Revocation of Naturalization and Recognition of German Citizenship, which deprived newly naturalized German Jews of their citizenship.
The withdrawal of nationality has also been a practice used in Latin American dictatorships, in the case of Chile, where the dictator Augusto Pinochet deprived opponents of nationality such as Salvador Allende's former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier -in 1976, when he was already he was in exile in Washington and eleven days before he was assassinated by a bomb explosion in his car - or trade unionist Ernesto Araneda, in 1977.
In recent years, countries such as France or the United Kingdom have taken measures to withdraw the nationality of some convicted of terrorism. In 2015, France deprived five convicts who had dual nationality of their nationality, in a decision endorsed five years later by the European Court of Human Rights, which assessed that the measure did not make them stateless by possessing another nationality.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Acnur), there are about 10 million stateless people in the world, many of them due to the lack of recognition of a specific ethnic group within a territory or restrictions on the extension of citizenship to children born abroad.
In recent decades, various conflicts have generated hundreds of thousands of stateless people, including the disintegration of the Soviet Union; the refusal of the Government of Bangladesh to recognize citizenship to around 300,000 Urdu-speaking Bihari upon the country's attainment of independence in 1971; or the decision of the Myanmar authorities to deprive more than 800,000 Rohingya of their nationality.
Thailand also concentrates a high number of stateless people, 800,000 according to 2021 data, born in the country and who have been residing in it for generations, the vast majority coming from tribes in the north and northeast of the country.
Among the famous cases of stateless persons, in this case by their own decision, is that of Albert Einstein, who voluntarily renounced his German nationality on two occasions, the first to avoid military service (1896-1901) and the second before the arrival of Hitler to power (1918-1933); or the chess player Víktor Korchnói, who renounced his Soviet nationality and declared himself a "citizen of the world" or stateless person after defecting from the communist regime in 1976.
