THE RIGHT TO BELONG: A JURISPRUDENTIAL INQUIRY INTO NATIONALITY, STATELESSNESS AND THE UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The term nationality is typically referred to as 'the right to have rights', but international law has not definitively provided that right to every individual. The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between nationality and statelessness, and the theory that human rights have universal application. This includes an examination of the doctrine's evolution from the Permanent Court of International Justice's view that nationality is purely a matter of domestic jurisdiction through the International Court of Justice's 'genuine link' test in the Nottebohm case, as well as through the provisions of the Statelessness Conventions of 1954 and 1961 and Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Furthermore, it will analyse the case studies from India concerning the Citizenship Act of 1955, the Assam Accord, the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019, all of which will be situated in the broader context of the constitutional provisions found in Articles 14 and 21 as well as India's Supreme Court decisions related to Sarbananda Sonowal, the Chakma case and Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha. By referencing Hannah Arendt’s description of statelessness as a loss of one’s ‘place in the world’ and the UNHCR statistics that estimate more than four million people worldwide who are stateless, the paper asserts that international law permits the state to determine one’s eligibility for belonging rather than the person, indicating that such residual sovereignty represented by the state impedes establishing a truly universal system of protection of human rights. The paper concludes by providing several recommendations in the sphere of municipal law, treaty formulation, and judicial procedures.