The Naturalisation of the Vulnerable: An International Responsibility

On the standard view of the attribution of human-rights responsibilities, notably exemplified by Beitz (2009), states are the primary bearers of duties corresponding to human rights, and international institutions only bear secondary duties. Despite its prima facie plausibility, this view has been recently challenged by what might be called the negative view of human-rights responsibilities (e.g., Pogge 2008; Dworkin 2013; Montero 2017). For the latter, international institutions are causally connected to some human-rights violations, and, therefore, they also bear a primary duty — that not to contribute to engendering them. This paper sheds light on another crack in the standard view, by showing that there are even more primary international responsibilities than commonly envisaged, and not just negative responsibilities at that — surprisingly, the positive duty to naturalise a class of particularly vulnerable individuals is one of them. The paper employs a republican perspective, namely, an approach to political morality based on freedom as non-domination (Pettit 1997). It defends the claim that, if, in a world made up of states, states are meant to protect, first and foremost, the human rights of their citizens, then the human right to become a citizen in the first place is owed to non-citizens too, or anyone. In other terms, there is a fundamental asymmetry between the human right to citizenship and all the other human rights: while the latter are primarily addressed against one’s state, the former is primarily addressed against the entire international community. If so, then the correlative duty to naturalise those who do not possess any citizenship-status, or do possess it but it is ineffective, is shared and international from the start, and states are its dischargers in a derivative sense only. This view has some further intriguing implications. First, naturalisation turns out not to be an exclusive prerogative of states. Second, individuals such as the refugees are owed more than just the fulfilment of basic needs, or asylum at best. Finally, the state system should be modified in profound and new ways to be able to realise human rights. The paper unfolds as follows. Section I justifies individuals’ claim to citizenship as a human right in that citizenship is constitutively necessary for republican freedom, and matter of international concern. Section II shows that the human right to citizenship has an international dimension. Section III argues that the beneficiaries of the international duty to naturalise are the stateless, refugees, and, arguably, some dual nationals, too. Section IV suggests what international reforms are needed to realise the human right to citizenship.