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Texte intégral
Journal article

Investment Citizenship and Democracy in a Global Age : Towards a Democratic Interpretation of International Nationality Law

    2019
Published in:
  • Swiss Review of International and European Law. - 2019, vol. 29, no. 4, p. 525-547
International Nationality Law
Citizenship
Democracy
English The commodification of citizenship through the development of «investment citizenship» (IC) programs, i.e. the programs that offer the acquisition of domestic citizenship through financial contribution only, needs to be addressed, so the article argues, through stronger democracy-oriented interpretations of international nationality law (INL). Unlike other arguments against IC advanced in political theory, this article arguesfrom within the legal practice itself. In contrast to other legal critiques of IC, however, it does not focus on domestic or European Union law, but on international law: it develops a new interpretation of INL that ex-cludes granting nationality on monetary grounds only. In short, the article argues that contemporary INL is best interpreted in the light of the international principle of democracy (IPD), and the customary interna-tional law principle of individual equality, as a form of international pre-commitment to democratic citizen-ship. What this means is that the factual conditions for the justification of democracy need to be protected not only under the IPD, but also under INL. In turn, this implies that the conditions of naturalization en-compass the sharing of equal and interdependent stakes, both positively so as to include those who share such stakes and negatively so as not to include those who do no
Faculty
Faculté de droit
Department
Département de droit international et droit commercial
Language
  • English
Classification
Law, jurisprudence
Other electronic version

Publisher's version

License
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Identifiers
  • RERO DOC 327825
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/308520
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