Chapter 2: Legislative and Policy Frameworks INTERNATIONAL COMMITMENTS Commitments on identifications and identity documents The first multilateral international treaty on nationality, adopted in 1930, aimed at establishing common rules to ensure that every person had a nationality, and just one nationality—while leaving states a large degree of sovereign discretion in determining who were their nationals.1 The international human rights regime established since the second World War presumes that states should respect and protect the rights of all those within their territories, whether nationals or not, and guarantees most rights to ‘everyone’. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also provides that “Everyone has the right to a nationality” and the framework of international treaties has since elaborated on that right, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which every UN member state except the USA is a party, and the conventions prohibiting discrimination (June 2016, Bronwen Manby). A range of international and regional human rights establish the right of every person to recognition as a person before the law, meant to ensure legal status and capacity to exercise rights and enter into contractual obligations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Article 6 states that “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”, regardless of whether they are citizens or immigrants, students or tourists, workers or refugees, or any other group. Article 16 of International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) also states right to recognition before the law. The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families adopted by General Assembly in 1990 stated in Article 24 that ‘Every migrant worker and every member of his or her family shall have the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law’. Recognition of children is “Where a child is illegally deprived of mentioned in Article 8. The Convention on the some or all of the elements of his or her Rights of the Child requires states to respect the identity, States Parties shall provide right of the child “to preserve his or her identity appropriate assistance and protection, with a view to re-establishing speedily his (including nationality, name and family relations)” or her identity.”--UNCRC, Article 8 and, “where a child is illegally deprived of some or 1
The Hague Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws, 1930.
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