http://www.crin.org/docs/citizenship-africa_20101118.pdf

Statelessness and discrimination are major obstacles to development as well as peace and security in Africa. Citizenship Law in Africa, a groundbreaking comparative study of 53 African countries, was first published by the Justice Initiative and the Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP) to shed light on these issues, and is now in its second edition.

Encouragingly, more than a dozen countries have amended their laws in recent years to reduce or eliminate gender discrimination. More than half Africa's States now allow dual citizenship, recognising the reality of contemporary patterns of migration.

For example, this past year Kenya adopted a new constitution that ends gender discrimination in nationality law, removes the prohibition on dual nationality, reduces the grounds on which citizenship can be withdrawn, and guarantees access to identity documents for all citizens. Libya also enacted reforms enabling the children of Libyan women with foreign husbands to apply for nationality, yet has fallen short of completely eliminating gender discrimination from its books.

Despite this progress, the report highlights a number of challenges. Only a handful of African countries give children a right to their nationality from birth if they would otherwise be stateless, despite the provisions of international treaties that require this protection. The laws of at least half a dozen countries include provisions that restrict nationality from birth to members of certain ethnic groups. And more than half of Africa's countries still discriminate against women and deny them the right to pass citizenship to their children or husbands. Half of Africa's States allow revocation of a person's birth nationality, and in many countries governments can rescind naturalised citizenship on highly arbitrary grounds.

Drawing on this vast body of research, the report presents a comprehensive set of recommendations on nationality law in Africa developed in consultation with key experts in the field. In particular, it calls on the African Union to provide minimum standards on nationality for the continent.

Further information

• CRINMAIL 1190: Children and Statelessness (September 2010)
  
• Nationality Rights for All - A progress report and global survey on statelessness (Refugees International - USA, March 2009)
  

Previous Publication (general) items

• 23/11/2010: CRIN: CRINAMAIL 1190-Arabic
• 23/11/2010: CRIN: CRINAMAIL 1191-Arabic
• 23/11/2010: CRIN: CRINAMAIL 1192-Arabic
• 23/11/2010: CRIN: CRINAMAIL 1193-Arabic
• 23/11/2010: CRIN: CRINAMAIL 1194-Arabic

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Open Society Justice Initiative

Last updated 24/11/2010 02:41:11

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