Africa Citizenship and Discrimination Audit

Citizenship policy is becoming a common vehicle for discriminatory action in a number of African countries. The Justice Initiative is mapping the worst offenders.

The Africa Discrimination and Citizenship Audit (the Audit) will map ethnic, racial, and citizenship-based discrimination in African countries and will look closely at the intersections of these kinds of discrimination, gender discrimination, and access to citizenship. The Audit is a response to the trend among some African governments to use group membership as a basis for political and economic marginalization. It is designed to provide a means to address restrictive citizenship policies that are either prima facie discriminatory or require individuals to meet effectively impossible conditions in order to prove their citizenship. In some countries these policies have resulted in mass denationalization or widespread statelessness.

The Audit is a project of the Open Society Justice Initiative (the Justice Initiative), the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA), and the Open Society Foundation of South Africa (OSF-SA). It is being implemented in cooperation with local partners in Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The Audit involves the documentation in each country of legislation, judgments, policy statements, and ratified regional and international instruments relevant to the following kinds of discrimination:

• Ethnic discrimination in access to social, political, and economic rights (for example, running for public office, housing, education, and health care).
• Intra-national discrimination, in which ‘indigeneity’ to a specific state within a federal country—usually correlated with ethnicity—is used to deprive individuals of their political, economic, and social rights in other parts of the country.
• Citizenship-based discrimination in access to social, political, and economic rights.
• Gender-based discrimination in access to citizenship (where women are unable to pass on their citizenship to their foreign-born spouses or children from these partnerships).
• Ethnic discrimination in access to citizenship (when members of certain ethnic groups are deprived of their lawful citizenship, barred from becoming naturalized citizens, and hindered from obtaining the documentation necessary to prove their citizenship).

With a view to establishing the legal framework in each of the above areas of discrimination, project partners are collecting and analyzing the following texts:

• Relevant provisions of ratified regional and international instruments, national constitutions and laws relating to discrimination (ethnic, racial, and citizenship-based), citizenship and nationality.
• Relevant provisions of ratified regional and international instruments, and national laws relating to refugees, migrant workers, and immigrants.
• Court decisions relating to ethnic and/or racial discrimination, determination of citizenship, and the rights of resident noncitizens.
• Empirical information on the ethnic, racial, and noncitizen composition of the population.

• Discrimination on the basis of ethnicty in access to citizenship
• Ethnic discrimination in access to public services and intra-national citizenship
• Discrimination against non-citizens or naturalized citizens on the basis of citizenship status, including restrictions placed on access to public services, employment, and land ownership

National partners will collect:

• Text of relevant provisions of ratified regional/international instruments, constitutions, and national laws relating to citizenship and nationality
• Text of relevant provisions of ratified regional/international instruments, constitutions, and national laws relating to refugees, migrants workers, and immigrants
• Information on administrative arrangements with respect to reception of refugees, decisions on refugee status, granting of citizenship, and resolution of cases of contested citizenship
• Empirical data on the number of non-citizens living in the country, broken down (if relevant) into the number of refugees, migrant workers, stateless persons
• Testimonials from individual victims of citizenship-related discrimination

Once compiled for each country, the Justice Initiative will synthesize these documents into a comparative report, together with a commentary on the socio-political context, aimed at increasing awareness of discrimination and recommending legislative change. The report will target civil society organizations and policymakers. Individual country reports may also be published.

Other Activities

The Justice Initiative and others will use the Audit as a basis for further action, such as promoting law reform in favor of increased protection against discrimination, and identifying opportunities for litigation at the national and regional levels to challenge discriminatory laws and practices. The report will provide a basis for advocating comprehensive anti-discrimination protections in the Audit countries, based upon international and regional standards.

The Justice Initiative will facilitate local consultations, where relevant, to generate ideas for further information-gathering and advocacy. The Justice Initiative will also liaise closely with policymakers and funders to increase awareness of this critical issue. Activities that have been suggested include:

• Comparing official policy and practice;
• Documenting successful advocacy efforts to amend discriminatory legislation;
• Promoting behavioral and attitudinal change; and
• Lobbying international bodies (such as the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and Human Rights Committee) to recognize and institutionalize needed protections.

The Justice Initiative will work closely with local partners, civil society organizations, lawmakers, and others to identify and design projects that promote anti-discrimination norms and practice. Partners will be consulted on how best to document any resulting projects.

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