Immigrants and Citizens

In our presentation we will discuss a new cause of statelessness of children that is currently emerging under Polish law. Statelessness in children can arise in situations where their foreign birth certificate is not tolerated by the legal system of ex lege nationality iure sanguinis on the grounds of disclosing persons of same-sex as parents in cases where such children do not acquire any other nationality. The children of same-sex couples are citizens de iure purely ‘on paper‘ but not in any meaningful practical sense, effectively becoming stateless because they are not treated as nationals by the state of which they are citizens. We will discuss the main issues in administrative and court proceedings in Poland and highlight the developments in the Council of Europe and European Union‘s law as a potential cure against the palpable malaise of administrative authorities in respect to ‘offending‘ birth certificates.

Participation in decision-making processes as an essential concept for social inclusion in participatory democracies plays also a vital role in combating against major crises. This role is even more important during public health crises in two dimensions. While the first one is related directly to the public participation for good management of the emergencies, the second is about the consequent human rights restrictions, which may pose different levels of impact on the participation of the vulnerable groups. For that reason, these restrictions may have more negative influences on immigrants than foreseen by the emergency regulations and so the scope and function of immigrants‘ participation in decision-making is of great interest during health crises. Hence, in this study, after examining these points upon the int. hr instruments, emerging implementations for the participation of immigrants from local to international levels including traditional and digital aspects will be revealed.

'Victims of citizenship‘ encompass the majority of the world‘s population for whom citizenship is a set of liabilities and obstacles rather than a bundle of rights, who are caged in spaces of no opportunity by border-crossing and visa rules designed to keep them out of the ‘First World‘, and who thus find themselves on the ‘other side‘ of the concept of citizenship, behind its Western façade of equality, political self-determination and rights. The global status quo that citizenship is there to perpetuate does not work in their favour: they are kept out for others to be ‘free‘. The whole point of citizenship is to perpetuate the victims‘ of citizenship exclusion from dignity and rights without any justification defensible in terms of the values officially underpinning any modern constitutional system. Having distilled the victims, the paper embraces citizenship abolitionism as the way forward for the constitutionalism of the future.