GUEST POST: Inter-American Court condemns unprecedented situation of statelessness in the Dominican Republic

Francisco Quintana at a hearing before the I-A Commission
speaking on behalf of the umbrella organisations in
DR "Dominicanos por Derechos". (Photo/OAS)

On October 22nd, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I-A Court) published its judgment in the Case of Expelled Dominican and Haitian people vs Dominican Republic. The case involved 6 families who were expelled from that country between 1999 and 2000. Out of the 26 victims, only five individuals were Haitian nationals. The families were represented by CEJIL and three other organizations. The ruling touched upon the problem of discrimination based on skin color; immigration detention; and the “systematic practice of collective expulsions”. At the heart of the ruling is the issue of prevention and reduction of statelessness. Since 13 of the victims were children, the ruling developed some of these rights from the “best interest of the child” perspective.

Background

For almost 100 years (for a fuller analysis see here) the Dominican Republic (DR) has allowed, either by state-control or private contracts, the arrival of Haitian workers, who were subjected to poverty and marginalization derived from their irregular status. International and regional human rights bodies, including UNHCR, UNICEF, CEDAW, CRC, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) have expressed their deep concern about the discrimination and mass violation of to the right to nationality that Haitian migrants and their descendants have been suffering.

From the 1950s to 1990s, a significant number of children of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic were formally recognized as citizens by registry officials. During that period, there was a reasonable application of identification required for the parents to register their children’s births. In the last two decades of the 20th century, some civil registry officials began requiring official proof of identity, such as passports or residence cards. The IACHR detected this problem early in 1999: “children do not have documents because their parents have none.”

Since 1929, the supreme law of the land had consistently established that people “in transit” were one of the two exceptions to the ius soli regime in the DR, with the other being the children of diplomats. Domestic civil law established 10 days as the maximum amount of time one can be “in transit.” It was not until the 1980s that this concept was applied more rigidly.

Legislative and Constitutional Changes

In 2004, the DR reformed its immigration law to incorporate the requirement of legal residence of foreign parents as the basis for their children’s acquisition of Dominican nationality. This criterion was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2005, which established a broad interpretation of the “in transit” exception. In the period of 2007-2009, Dominican authorities adopted a series of administrative and judicial actions that made it virtually impossible to obtain nationality at birth for those affected. During that time, a consistent process of arbitrary deprivation of nationality began, even for people who had enjoyed that right for 10, 20, 30 or more years.

In 2010, the new Dominican Constitution solidified the interpretation of the law used in the last decade by incorporating a new exception to the ius soli regime: the children of undocumented residents.

Judicial Denationalization on a Massive Scale

On September 23^rd, 2013, people of foreign parents born on Dominican soil dating back to 1929 did not know if their nationality was going to be respected. Their own Constitutional Tribunal had deprived them of that right (TC ruling 168/13) by upholding the previous Supreme Court decision. According to an official survey by the Dominican National Bureau for Statistics, an estimated 200,000 persons were affected by the decision. The numbers could be greater, as these figures only incorporate the first generation of the affected group. To date, the Dominican authorities have only recognized less than 25,000 people, of which only 60% are of Haitian descent.

The implementing law of the TC ruling (Law 169/14) does not conceptualize people born in the DR to foreign parents before 2007 as Dominicans. Although the language could seem neutral on its face, it has a clearly disproportionate impact on Dominicans of Haitian descent. Law 16/14 divided the affected population in two groups. The first group, who according to the preamble of the law “believed” they were nationals because they received official documents, would obtain nationality because the State recognized its own administrative mistake, not because they were born on its soil. The second group, who lacked any kind of document, was directly classified as foreigners in their own country and obligated to follow a naturalization process.

Inter-American Justice returns to the Dominican Republic

In December 2013, the IACHR visited the island again only to realize that its previous findings had multiplied by hundreds of thousands. In the landmark decision of the Case of the Girls Yean and Bosico (2005), the Inter-American Court established for the first time that the right to nationality could not be limited based on discriminatory purposes, and that the migration status of the parents could not be inherited by their children for the purposes of denying nationality. The Court also stressed the importance of the prevention and reduction of statelessness when the place of birth is the only requisite that should be considered for those people that could not acquire a nationality different from that of the country where they were born.

Nine years later, in the Case of Expelled Dominicans and Haitians (2014) ruling, the Inter-American Court restated its interpretation of Dominican domestic law when it affirmed that it did not find any reason to change the Yean and Bosico standard. On the contrary, the Court took this opportunity to expand its reasoning, when it declared that:

   a.      The TC ruling 168/13 had retroactively deprived all children born to undocumented foreign parents since 1929 of their nationality. (para. 313)

   b.      The criteria used by the TC is discriminatory and contrary to the principle of equality before the law, since it ignores the characteristics of the person born in the DR and focuses on the lack of documentation of their parents, without justifying this distinction.(para. 318)

    c.      The implementing Law 169/14 creates additional obstacles to the full enjoyment of the right to nationality, because it requires affected persons to register as foreigners in their country of birth. This naturalization process is thus per se contrary to the right to nationality in a country with a jus soli regime.

    d.      An expedited naturalization procedure for a person that is already entitled to a nationality, irrespective of the time it could last, is contrary to the full enjoyment of that right. (para. 324).

   e.      The obligation to prevent statelessness requires States to have full assurance that immediately after birth a child would have an effective nationality; absent that situation, the Inter-American Court declared an ex lege (automatic) obligation to grant the nationality of the State where the child was born. (paras. 259 to 261)

   f.       The Court ordered the Dominican government to take all steps – including at the constitutional, legislative or judicial level – in order to leave the TC ruling 168, and part of Law 169/14, without legal effect. (para. 469)

Déjà vu reaction of the Dominican government

In 2005, a month after the Yean and Bosico judgment was issued, Dominican authorities called the decision “unacceptable” and declared that there was an intent to “discredit” the country before the international community. One week later the Dominican Senate acted in the same direction by rejecting the ruling of the Inter-American Court. The 2005 Supreme Court decision previously mentioned also confronted directly this decision.

In 2014, the new Inter-American Court ruling has already sparked the same xenophobic and anti-Haitian sentiments of the past. Despite the fact that there had been unanimous condemnation of the massive judicial deprivation of nationality carried out by the TC 168/13 ruling, the Dominican government continues to deny that discrimination or statelessness even exists in the country. Only 48 hours after the ruling was made public, the Dominican Republic Executive branch issued a statement rejecting the ruling in very strong language and bringing up the ancient argument that its own notions of State sovereignty exempt it from compliance with its binding, freely accepted international human rights obligations.

Conclusion

The Inter-American Court has set a clear example of how justice should be done when States arbitrarily limit, deny or deprive persons of their right to nationality. In a public statement CEJIL has emphasized that the decisions of the Court should never be considered an attack to the sovereignty of any State, but rather an affirmation of a way forward to respect the human rights of all. The Dominican government has to understand that under international law and the American Convention on Human Rights, compliance with this judgment is a binding obligation that cannot be ignored.

The impact that this new ruling could have in other regions of the world where similar judicial restrictions, ambiguous or discriminatory interpretations of the law are implemented is unquestionable. We expect that the international community, academia, and civil society around the world will take the time to read the judgment and support the struggle for justice and dignity of hundreds of thousands of people around the world who, just as in the Dominican Republic, are being deprived of the full enjoyment of their right to nationality.

Francisco Quintana, Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) 

[This blog was simultaneously posted on the website of the European Network on Statelessness]

What connects Tom Hanks, Osama Bin Laden and Albert Einstein?

On the 10^th of December every year, Tilburg University joins many other organisations and individuals around the world to celebrate Human Rights Day: the day on which, in 1948, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was signed and the modern human rights era was born. A symposium is convened on campus, where a human rights topic is explored and the ‘Max van der Stoel Award’ for best dissertation in the field of human rights is presented. In 2013, the Statelessness Programme was invited to provide the substance for the Human Rights Day symposium and give the audience an insight into the lives of stateless people. Honoured to be asked and excited by the challenge of summarising the experience of statelessness just half an hour, my colleague Zahra Albarazi and I set to work and came up with the following provocative question around which to construct our presentation: “What connects Tom Hanks, Osama Bin Laden and Albert Einstein?” For those who were unable to attend the Human Rights Day event in Tilburg, here’s a brief run-down of the answer to that question… 
[Click on the youtube links to watch the short clips we showed the audience on the day]


Now, it is important to note at the outset of this blog that these three names have been put together in a single sentence for the sole purpose of explaining about the different ways in which people can become affected by statelessness. We are not by any means suggesting that they are otherwise in any way alike or share anything else in common. Nor, to be entirely accurate, are we actually implying that Tom Hanks is or was himself a stateless person. Rather, in one of his film roles, he played the stateless Victor Navorski and it is with Victor’s story that we opened the symposium.

“Currently, you are a citizen of nowhere… You don't qualify for asylum, refugee status, temporary protective status, humanitarian parole, or non-immigration work travel. You don't qualify for any of these. You are at this time simply... unacceptable.” 

In the film ‘The Terminal’, after demonstrating the demise of his country by bursting a bag of crisps with an apple (really!), this is how the Director of Customs and Border Protection (played by Stanley Tucci) explains to Victor Navorksi (played by Tom Hanks) why he is stuck at JFK Airport. The extract from the film where this happens – a fascinating, entertaining and immediately heart-wrenching two and a half minute scene – is perhaps one of the best introductions to the world of statelessness and a fantastic teaching resource. Very quickly, it (roughly) explains how the break-up of a state can leave a person stateless without them asking for it, doing anything or even knowing that it has happened. This gives an immediate insight into one of the most significant causes of statelessness globally, state succession, which has left many hundreds of thousands of people stateless – including in Europe, following the dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia. The same extract also provides a simple and compelling description of a stateless person: “a citizen of nowhere”, a reasonably sound summary of the international legal definition (i.e. “a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law”). But perhaps most importantly, the Director of Customs and Border Protection’s reels off in his little speech all the forms of protection status which a non-national may qualify for in order to be allowed to enter or reside in the US before being forced to conclude that Victor Navorski does not qualify for any of them. There is no tool in his arsenal for dealing with cases like Victor’s, which is why Victor is simply left to fend for himself in the international departures lounge of JFK Airport – prohibited from entering the United States but also unable to board a plane and leave. The JFK departures lounge becomes a very apt metaphor for the real-life limbo in which many stateless people are trapped precisely because many countries do not have a special protection status for stateless people who they encounter in the migration context. While most do not live at airports, the reality is that many are considered “unacceptable” and are forced to somehow find a way to survive without being allowed to enter, reside or work in the country they are in, but also without the alternative of return or onward travel to any other country. This problem lies at the heart of the debate about and emergence of dedicated statelessness protection regimes, as seen recently for instance in the United Kingdom.  

To take the story of statelessness out of the realms of fiction, we followed the extract from the Terminal with two short video clips about Mikhail Sebastian, whose predicament was once described as “a sweaty Pacific island version of ‘The Terminal’”. Mikhail became stateless following the break-up of the USSR and has lived in the United States since 1995. In December 2011, he travelled to American Samoa for what was meant to be a short holiday, but when it came time to go home to Los Angeles, he was prevented from doing so by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. In this video (first 2.20 minutes), Mikhail explains how he became trapped: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dol2QbNWfs.

Eventually, after more than a year stuck on the island and after significant media attention was devoted to his story, student groups mobilised on his behalf and lawyers argued his case, Mikhail was allowed to return to the United States and pick up the threads of his life there. But his statelessness remains unresolved and he continues to face all sorts of restrictions and has to deal with tiresome bureaucracy. As he explains (minute 4.15 to 5.30) in this film, Mikhail would dearly love to become a citizen and officially belong somewhere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4zELYdyXpY.

Back to the main question of the symposium: what connects Tom Hanks, Osama Bin Laden and Albert Einstein? Next up is Osama Bin Laden. A lesser-known fact about this now deceased, notorious international terrorist is that he was stripped of his Saudi Arabian citizenship in the 1990s, in response to his vocal criticism of the ruling regime, rendering him stateless. While Bin Laden’s case is unlikely to evoke concern or compassion, his story is nevertheless illustrative of another wider scenario in which statelessness emerges. Citizenship policy is, at times, used as a political tool: wielded in order to silence opposition voices or disqualify a political opponent from running for election. The latest backdrop against which such policy has emerged is that of the Arab Spring, where vocal critics of the ruling powers have become targets for denationalisation, often leading to statelessness. This 2-minute news item on Al Jazeera that we showed at the symposium illustrates the problem with the story of two Bahraini brothers who were stripped of their citizenship in late 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRiizGbNL24. The story of the Fairouz brothers is particularly compelling because they used to be Members of Parliament. From using their citizenship rights to the full – exercising the right to be elected and representing other citizens – they are now citizens of nowhere, stateless. There’s a lesson there about never taking your nationality for granted.

The final story of statelessness selected for our Human Rights Day symposium was introduced through the example of Albert Einstein. Einstein was stateless for five years at the end of the 19^th century, after renouncing his German nationality. Although Einstein initiated his own statelessness and it was short-lived thanks to his naturalisation as a Swiss citizen (and later also as a US national), his story is inextricably tied to the plight of the German Jews under the Nazi regime. Einstein became a refugee in the 1930s and worked tirelessly on behalf of other German Jews. The large-scale denationalisation of Jewish exiles and refugees was one of the tools used by the Nazi regime in its persecution of this population, which brings us to one of the darkest manifestations of statelessness: that caused by the deliberate, discriminatory and en masse deprivation of nationality. In spite of the prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of nationality, laid down 65 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights precisely because of the dangers inherent in the manipulation of nationality policy by those in power, instances of collective denationalisation have continued. Today, a key characteristic of a population commonly described as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, the Rohingya, is that they were rendered stateless through arbitrary deprivation of their nationality. We used this two and a half minute video about the exhibition of a photography project on the Rohingya, by Greg Constantine, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in November 2013 to explain the story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddu5VethFu4.

This is how, through the exploitation of loose affiliations to Tom Hanks, Osama Bin Laden and Albert Einstein, we demonstrated some of the ways in which statelessness can strike – affecting different people, for different reasons, with different consequences. Given the setting of a Human Rights Day symposium, we chose to end on the screening one further short video, from a project that the Statelessness Programme was involved in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ_Y0hW3DdA. The story of Um Chadi, who Zahra met in her home in Jordan and interviewed for a project with the Women’s Refugee Commission, says it all: if you are concerned about human rights, you should be concerned about statelessness. The human impact is real and significant.   

Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager of the Statelessness Programme

GUEST POST: Long way back to citizenship

(Second blog on the history of 'Dutch statelessness' after the Spanish civil war)

In my first blog I described the recruitment of Dutch volunteers for the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), how the Dutch state reacted to this recruitment and how it actively sought the names of those volunteers to revoke their citizenship. At the end of my last blog, I described how a group of some 120 volunteers returned to the Netherlands by train and were declared stateless from now on.

Meanwhile I looked into the question of why this group came back in such an official manner. In a biography about the first Dutch volunteer in this war, Fanny Schoonheyt, also called the ‘queen of the machine gun’, the author offers an answer. It was due to an agreement in the Non-Intervention Committee, a committee which was set up by France and England and also joined by Germany, Italy and the USSR. The Committee had the goal of preventing this war from spreading to become an international conflict. In this committee, it was decided that the repatriation of the volunteers would be the task for the states where they came from. The Netherlands agreed to this. Furthermore it was decided that the volunteers would not be punished for their participation in the war. From the Dutch point of view, the loss of citizenship was to be considered a measure, not a punishment.

This point of view was debatable. In the Nederlandsch Juristenblad (Dutch Advocacy Review) of June 1937, lawyer I. Kisch anticipates the homecoming of the volunteers and writes an essay on the question of whether they should lose their citizenship or not. This essay is not only an interesting interpretation of the (French) history of this law and how it should be implemented, but also a confession of somebody who has seen, as he writes, ‘the misery of statelessness’: avoid as much as reasonable any case of statelessness, is his advice.

Prisoners of war

The misery of statelessness was very real for those volunteers who became prisoners of war. At least 25 Dutch volunteers were held in camps in Spain, and their situation became more complicated as Germany occupied the Netherlands and pressured Spain not to release any men between 18 and 40 years old: they might join the allied forces. Also, being repatriated to a country occupied by Nazi Germany was not a good option for those Dutch anti-fascists, and they were dependent on the good will and assistance from the Dutch authorities to find a country willing to accept them. Unfortunately, the Dutch authorities did not always make a big effort to help them, and for some time did not even feel responsible at all, as those prisoners were no longer considered to be Dutch citizens. This point of view was eventually revised.

One option was to absorb them into the Dutch brigades in England, whereto the Dutch government had fled in 1940. But the Dutch minister of defense refused to accept communists, although, as he admitted, they were probably experienced fighters. Finally, in august 1942, some eleven Dutch POWs were released to Curacao. Upon arrival there, it was disclosed that two of them were actually Germans pretending to be Dutch citizens in order to avoid deportation to Germany.

The last prisoners were released only in 1943, this time directly to England. They wanted to join the armed forces there, but were only offered the status of volunteers in the Dutch army, as they were considered stateless and thus not regular soldiers. Confusingly enough, those prisoners were given Dutch passports before their shipment to England due to differing opinions on whether they had lost their nationality or not between Dutch ministries. The business of enrolling in the army was settled in 1944, when it was concluded that somebody who had lost his citizenship might still be called up for army service. Other former volunteers in Spain, who had lost their citizenship and lived in the Netherlands, had received their draft card in 1939, just like everybody else. It seems that the consequences of losing one’s nationality with regard to the army draft were not clear.

 

German occupation (1940-1945)

So, some volunteers back in the Netherlands received a draft card, and many joined the resistance after the capitulation of the Netherlands. How did their statelessness affect their lives?

Before and after the occupation, there were certain consequences that affected the life of a stateless person. One was not allowed to vote or to be a candidate in any elections. Now considerd an alien, one was even not allowed to be politically active at all. Also, one was considered an alien and had to register as such and apply for a residence permit, which had to be renewed on a regular basis. To travel to other countries, one needed a special passport that was more expensive and had a shorter validity than a regular one. Working as a civil servant, or any job that required a certain nationality, was not possible. Work was only possible with a work permit, which was necessary for every new job again, and this permit had a price - also for the employer. One former volunteer who worked as a painter described how the alien police would inform the employer about his past in Spain, and that if he had work, he would always be the first who was kicked out. At that time, it had a stigmatizing effect, as one’s political affiliation was revealed.

How the status of being stateless affected the life of the former volunteers during the German occupation is not clear. It is known that the Germans were interested in the Dutch files about those volunteers, and also that after the February strike in 1941, a strike in solidarity with the Jewish population of Amsterdam, those files were studied once more by the Germans. Maybe a study of the different biographies of those volunteers would give a better idea, but I suppose that the statelessness, and thus the fact that someone had fought in Spain, already made those people some kind of outlaw and the decision to go underground might have been almost a necessity for many of them.

Renaturalization after occupation

The fact that the volunteers were in an especially dangerous position with regard to the German occupier, was mentioned as an explanation regarding the re-naturalization of twenty former volunteers in the end of 1945. However, the renaturalization of the former volunteers in Spain would become a long story. In the beginning, after the liberation of the Netherlands, it did not seem so. As mentioned, many volunteers were part of the resistance, and there was more recognition for the fact that they had already fought against fascism in Spain. The Dutch Prime Minister Schemerhorn was in favour of granting permission retroactively, thus reversing the act of revoking citizenship. Unfortunately, the (Catholic) minister of Justice, Kolfschoten, was against this, and he was granted the time to come with another solution. Furthermore, the former volunteers were not the only group asking for Dutch citizenship: in 1946/1947, there were some 8000 applicants for Dutch citizenship. A big group of those applicants were mostly German, but also Polish or Russian wives of Dutch forced labourers returning from Germany. Between 1945 an 1947, nationality was not granted automatically to these foreign wives and some 1000 couples waited in a camp in Bocholt, Germany, close to the Dutch border, until the ‘Committee for marriages with women of enemy or other foreign nationalities’ decided about their case.

Finally, Kolfschoten orderd  to renaturalize as it was done before the occupation . So in 1946, twenty former volunteers were presented in a bill to parliament. Members of parliament had to agree with their renaturalization all in one. If one person was refused, the other nineteen would have to wait to be presented again in another group. As the explanatory memorandum, appended to the bill, was insufficiently informative, members of parliament made a specific request to the minister concerning the principle to be applied: the positive system, implying that the naturalization must be in the interest of the Dutch State, or the negative system, in which the interest of the applicant would be of primary consideration. The minister answered that the positive system would be applied, as it was before the German occupation.

Until 1948, some 62 former volunteers were given their citizenship back. The slow procedure was to the disadvantage of the applicants, as the tension between the East and the West was growing, and communists in the Netherlands were considered more and more to be an internal enemy. One incident especially stirred up anti-communists feelings: in February 1949, the French communist leader Maurice Thorez hinted at helping the Soviets against the imperialist West in the event of war. The Dutch leader of the communist party (CPN), Paul de Groot, agreed with Thorez, although he emphasized the importance of avoiding war altogether.

The strongest reaction to this statement came from the chairman of the catholic political party KVP, Romme. He asked (among a list of other things) to revoke the citizenship of all communists, as they potentially intended to take military service for another country (the USSR). Indeed, being a lawyer himself, he probably knew that this proposal stood no ground legally speaking. It exhibits, however, that the communists were more and more considered to be ‘fifth column’, traitors and bad patriots. This must be understood against the backdrop of the fear of a Russian invasion.

From now on it became official policy to exclude communists from re-naturalization. Not against whom one had fought was now of interest, but against whom one was willing to fight in case of war. According to this new standard, former SS-soldiers who had fought in the East stood a better chance.

In 1951, the next step by the government was the introduction of a bill that would re-naturalize all stateless people in the Netherlands at once – except for those too much aligned with communism. This was a big group: some estimated 15.000 men and their spouses and offspring had lost their citizenship due to collaboration with the Germans, mostly by joining the Waffen-SS. And there were still a dozen former volunteers who had fought in Spain.

Almost the whole parliament was against this proposal: against the mixing up of the two groups, and against the re-naturalization of the former collaborators with one stroke of the pen. The bill was amended and made law. Now it was only applicable to those who had served in an enemy state, thus excluding the former volunteers in Spain. The mixing up of the two groups was avoided, but to the disadvantage of the Spanish volunteers.

Between 1950 and 1955, only 22 volunteers were renaturalized. In an official document of 1964 the reasons for the refusal of renaturalization of 45 former volunteers are listed: 16% were accused of having collaborated with the Germans, 17% of a criminal past, one person of living together out of wedlock, and 65% had an ‘extreme left orientation’ (being present at communist meetings was enough evidence). The first reason, collaboration, is rather curious, as at the same time thousands of former Waffen-SS soldiers were renaturalized.

Finally, thanks to a particular individual case, the exclusion of people with unwanted political ideas was dropped. Former volunteer Siep Adema had applied for renaturalization twice and was refused both times because of his communist background. He applied again in 1963, this time with added motivation: West-Germany had finally come up with financial compensation for those who had been prisoners in concentration camps. Adema was imprisoned for four full years in different camps and would get the highest amount possible – but he had to be a Dutch citizen. It was a bilateral agreement, probably referring to ‚Dutch citizens’. It was considered too much of an injustice if he could not touch the money, and the minister granted citizenship retroactively, as this was the only way of being able to apply. Three more volunteers benefited from this procedure for the same reason.

From this point on, political convictions were left out of consideration regarding applicants. By the end of the 1960s, all applications were dealt with. Whether there were still stateless volunteers who never filed an application is unknown to me, but it seems quite possible, as some volunteers refused to apply for renaturalization.

 

Julia Mattern wrote her master thesis about the loss of citizenship of Dutch volunteers working for the Nazi construction organisation “Organisation Todt” during German occupation (1940-1945). This organisation built e.g. the Atlantic Wall.

 

Literature:

Hans Dankaart e.a., De oorlog begon in Spanje, 1985, Van Gennep, Amsterdam

M.D. Bogaarts and C.M.J. Ruijters, De periode van het kabinet Beel, 1989, SDU-uitgeverij, ’s-Gravenhage

Yvonne Scholten, Fanny Schoonheyt, 2011, J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam

Julia Mattern, ‚...Verzoek ik U beleefd mij weer als Nederlander op te nehmen...’, 2006, RUN, Nijmegen

I. Kisch, Vreemde Krijgsdienst in: Nederlandsch Juristenblad 1937, p. 719ff

Benjamin Kaplan et al.,Boundaries and their meanings in the history of the Netherlands, 2009, Brill, Leiden/Boston, p. 217

GUEST BLOG: A short history of ‘Dutch statelessness’ after the Spanish Civil War

The Dutch minister of Justice is currently researching the possibility of revoking Dutch passports or even the citizenship of those currently fighting against the Assad regime in Syria. According to the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, Dick Schoof, some one hundred, mostly young people have made the journey from the Netherlands to Syria. While the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats propose to revoke only passports to prevent people travelling to Syria, Geert Wilders’ PVV party asked explicitly to consider revoking Dutch citizenship in the case of double nationality and to deport those former Dutch citizens to the country of citizenship according to their other passport. Liberal Dijkshoorn (VVD) wonders, if those fighters might lose their citizenship in analogy to what was once considered ‘foreign military service’ and asks the minister, if it is possible to revoke as many Dutch citizenships as possible.

In light of the current affairs, it is worth looking at the history of Dutch volunteer fighters in foreign wars. One of these wars was the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Some 600 Dutch volunteers joined the communist International Brigades to fight against Franco and the Nationalists. Another dozen joined the anarchist forces. According to one publication there was also one Dutchman fighting on the side of Franco. The Dutch state chose a politics of non-intervention concerning the civil war in Spain, and a politics of intervention concerning the domestic groups, mostly communist, in support of the Spanish Republic. The Dutch government was aware of groups that started the recruitment of volunteers for the war in Spain. People who had fought in Spain but regretted their choice were helped to return to the Netherlands in exchange for information. Secret agents were used to collect names of Dutch citizens in Spain and helped to collect information pertaining to the manner in which these citizens arrived in Spain.

The problem was that there were no legal means to stop people from leaving the country (as is the case today). What could be done, however, was putting a stamp in new passports that made them invalid for Spain. This probably did not have much effect, as those involved in recruiting and helping volunteers had prior experience in helping German communists who fled persecution in Germany since 1933, sometimes helping them to get to Belgium or France: they had experience in secretly helping people cross the border illegally. Once a volunteer reached the French-Spanish border, the republicans couldn’t care less about their passports, with or without a stamp. They openly welcomed the help offered by the foreign volunteers, especially in the early phase of the conflict.

Another measure by the Dutch state was a communiqué by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in January 1937, stating that those who joined the armed forces in Spain would lose their Dutch citizenship. This was not a new law: according to the Dutch Nationality Law of 1892 article 7, section 4: ‘one loses his or her citizenship by joining foreign military or civil service without Our permission.’ From a legal standpoint, this loss was automatic and not to be considered a punishment. This communiqué must be seen as a measure to restrict travel for future volunteers. It seems, however, as if it didn’t have much of an effect, as most volunteers left the Netherlands after this communiqué.

At the same time, as stated above, the state actively researched the names of those who went to Spain (by, for instance, interviewing family members of those suspected). While revoking their citizenship might have been automatic, acquiring the names of the concerned individuals was anything but. In June 1937, a new royal order was implemented, stating that all acts promoting and assisting participation in one of the forces in Spain are forbidden, thus criminalizing all recruitment activity. All political parties were in favour of this order, except for the communist party (CPN). Despite a few arrests in enforcing this order, recruitment was secretly conducted from the very start and thus hardly affected. Meanwhile, some deserters returned to the Low Countries, stating they were promised work in Spain. Interviews with some of these deserters in the newspaper de Telegraaf draw a picture of poor workless people being press-ganged with false promises. It is most likely the case that these deserters created a story that would ultimately help them in not having their citizenship revoked, e.g.: it was work they were looking for in Spain, not war, and they were forced to fight.

It is estimated that some 250 volunteers lost their citizenship upon returning to the Netherlands, and about 200 volunteers managed to avoid it. As Toon van de Berg stated: ‘It didn’t happen to me, I left in silence, and I came back in even more silence.’ In 1938 the Spanish Republic decided to withdraw all foreign volunteers. This measure was done in the hope to gain more sympathy and help from Western States, especially France and England who were neutral in the conflict. While Germany and Italy officially also were neutral, they supported Franco. The biggest support for the republicans came from the U.S.S.R., and their help was on the decline. At the same time, the political situation in Europe was becoming ever more tense, as Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia with an armed conflict in order to annex the Sudentenland.

In October 1938 a big parade was organized in Barcelona as to see off the foreign volunteers- some 200.000 people gathered to celebrate their departure. The welcome in the Netherlands was a different one. A group of 117 Dutch volunteers entered the country by train in Roosendaal and were welcomed by the Marechaussee and official investigators. The singing of battle songs was forbidden, but as it was 5 December, the day of St Nicholas, the group decided to sing the well-known Dutch St Nicholas song: ‘See over there, the steamboat from Spain is arriving again’, a song that could hardly be forbidden. After all luggage was inspected by the Marechaussee, who were searching for weapons and propaganda material, an official told the group that they had lost their Dutch citizenship. They were served a meal of sauerkraut and bacon, which led afterwards to a discussion in the Dutch parliament: was this meal, paid for by the State, indeed necessary? It is unclear why those volunteers didn’t try to reach the Netherlands without being noticed by the authorities – maybe the group was just too big to do it otherwise. Some 62 volunteers followed later on.

What is striking in the literature about the Dutch volunteers in Spain is that, on the one hand, people were aware of the possibility of losing one’s citizenship by joining the armed forces in the civil war, and, on the other hand, that the fact of losing this citizenship also gets a prominent place in the literature. In my research for my Master’s thesis about loss of citizenship after the German occupation, it felt like looking for a needle in a haystack, especially with regard to other groups than the SS. The fact that the statelessness of the volunteers in the Spanish Civil War receives such a prominent place in the literature is not only due to the indignation of this measure, as the volunteers felt they were fighting the first and just battle against the upcoming fascism in Europe, but also because this statelessness put them in a vulnerable position as soon as the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940. In addition, the process of regaining the Dutch citizenship after the German occupation would become a theatre play with many acts, with the latest known re-naturalisation in 1969.

More on the consequences of statelessness for the Dutch volunteers after the Spanish Civil War and the long way to become a Dutch citizen again in my next blog…

Julia Mattern wrote her master thesis about the loss of citizenship of Dutch volunteers working for the Nazi construction organisation “Organisation Todt” during German occupation (1940-1945). This organisation built e.g. the Atlantic Wall.