Birthright Citizenship: Trends and Regulations in Europe
EUDO Citizenship Observatory Comparative Report No. RSCAS/EUDO-CIT-Comp. 2010/8
40 Pages Posted: 25 Nov 2010
Date Written: November 25, 2010
Abstract
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 15(1), states that everyone is entitled to a nationality. However the Universal Declaration does not indicate which conditions entitle a person to such a citizenship status. The fact that most, if not all, citizenship laws typically start with setting out the rules of attribution of citizenship at birth, and only later on in these documents specify rules concerning, for example, declaration and naturalization procedures, and loss of citizenship, signifies a hierarchy of importance. Birthright citizenship is the main allocation mechanism to ensure that everybody is a citizen of at least one state. Within the international state system, citizenship laws, and specifically the birthright provisions, function as a key classifying mechanism. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the rules across thirty-three European states on the acquisition of citizenship by virtue of birth, either by descent from a citizen or by birth at the territory of a state. The study also discusses trends during the last thirty years, going back to the early 1980s.
Keywords: Citizenship, Birthright, Migration, Comparative Law, Europe
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