Southern African Nationality Network

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Identifying gaps in law and policy on the protection of stateless people and the prevention of statelessness.

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Comparative Analysis

Fostering dialogue on common challenges and potential solutions to improve the protection of stateless people.

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Advocacy

Enhancing advocacy on law and policy reform towards universal access to nationality rights and the eradication of statelessness.

The tool uses 8 key indicators to assess and score each country:

  • Ratification of international and regional instruments
  • Access to birth registration and birth certificates
  • Prevention of statelessness at birth
  • Gender equality in nationality laws and birth registration laws
  • Naturalisation
  • Loss and deprivation of nationality
  • Due process / just administrative action in nationality administration
  • Resolution of status of persons of unknown nationality

Introducing The Southern African Nationality Rights Index

Stateless people are those with no nationality. Thousands of people in Africa are affected by statelessness because of state succession, gaps in nationality laws, barriers to birth registration, discrimination, displacement, and arbitrary deprivation of citizenship.

Statelessness denies many basic human rights: education, employment, marriage, registering a child, or legal existence

Many African states lack effective protection or prevention laws on statelessness and there is no clear, consistent, or comprehensive approach to identify stateless people, to grant protection to stateless people, and to prevent childhood statelessness.

In response to this, SANN has launched the Southern African Nationality Rights Index – a survey tool that analyses law, policy, and practice country-by-country and benchmarks them against international norms and good practice to identify areas of improvement and examples of best practice.

Click on the “Southern African Nationality Rights Index” page to see the available information on: