The right to change one’s nationality is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet today it can be exercised only with another state’s permission: in almost every country, renouncing one’s nationality first requires acquiring someone else’s. We ask the United Nations to begin developing an interim international status — Transitional Citizenship — that would allow a person to end the legal bond of nationality with their state without becoming stateless.

Before turning to the argument — here is how this changes a person’s position compared with the two states that exist today. 

How to obtain it after giving up the previous status

—    National citizenship (today): only by replacing it with a new nationality — subject to another state’s permission.

—    Statelessness (today): practically unattainable by choice; occurs almost only as a result of being born stateless or being stripped of nationality.

—    Transitional Citizenship (proposed): available by the person’s own decision, without first having to obtain a new nationality.

Obligations to the former/current state

—    National citizenship (today): the full set of obligations arising specifically from nationality: military service duty and other nationality-specific requirements.

—    Statelessness (today): formally none, but the status itself is nearly unreachable.

—    Transitional Citizenship (proposed): end together with the nationality — the state treats the person as a foreign national, whatever they were to it before.

Obligations as a resident of the country of residence

—    National citizenship (today): apply regardless of nationality, for as long as the person lives on its territory.

—    Statelessness (today): apply, but without the documents and protection that come with lawful status.

—    Transitional Citizenship (proposed): remain in full — the same as for any foreign resident, including tax obligations.

Rights and protection

—    National citizenship (today): full scope of a national’s rights.

—    Statelessness (today): extremely limited; often no documents and no legal protection.

—    Transitional Citizenship (proposed): rights and status of a foreign resident, plus an international mechanism of legal and diplomatic protection that neither a national of the former state nor a stateless person has.

1. A Right That Exists Only on Paper

Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets out two guarantees: the right to a nationality, and the right to change it. The wording of the second guarantee is unambiguous: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”

The first guarantee functions. The second, in practice, almost never does.

The 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness provides that renunciation of nationality must not result in statelessness unless the person already holds, or is about to acquire, another nationality (Article 7). The domestic law of most states follows the same logic.

This rule protects people from statelessness and should not be repealed. But it carries an unintended consequence: the right to change one’s nationality has been made contingent on a decision by a third party. A person can make the decision — but cannot act on it until some other state agrees to accept them.

2. The Cost Is Measured in Decades

According to the Global State of Citizenship dataset (GLOBALCIT, European University Institute), the most common residence requirement for naturalisation is five years, applied in 76 states. The global average is roughly seven years. In some countries the requirement runs as high as thirty years (the United Arab Emirates) or forty (Equatorial Guinea).

On top of the waiting period come language and civics tests, income and housing requirements, a clean criminal record, and — in many countries — the state’s discretion to refuse an application without giving any reason.

Between a person’s decision and their ability to act on it, then, lies anywhere from five to forty years of another state’s administrative discretion. For a decision made on grounds of conscience, this is not a delay. It is a refusal.

3. This Idea Already Had a Working Precedent

The proposal may sound utopian. It is not: a comparable mechanism has already existed, and it worked.

In 1922, at the initiative of Fridtjof Nansen, the first League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the “Nansen passport” was created — an internationally recognised identity document granting the right to travel and to work. It was recognised by 52 states. Over the life of the system, roughly 450,000 such documents were issued.

This was the first instance in which a person’s legal status was determined not by their state of nationality, but by an international agreement. The system did not abolish state sovereignty, create a new state, or require any change of borders. It created a document, a standard, and a mechanism of mutual recognition.

Today the infrastructure is incomparably stronger: travel documents under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, ICAO standards for machine-readable and biometric documents, and the institutional base of UNHCR. The technical part of the problem was solved nearly a century ago. What remains unresolved is the political part.

4. What Is Proposed

To establish an internationally recognised Transitional Citizenship status that allows a person to voluntarily renounce their state’s nationality without becoming stateless.

The status should provide for:

—    an official identity document;

—    an internationally recognised travel document;

—    the right to lawfully reside and work in the host state, in accordance with its domestic law;

—    access to the public and social services the host state provides for under its own law;

—    an international mechanism of legal and diplomatic protection;

—    the possibility of subsequently acquiring the nationality of a chosen state and exiting the transitional status.

Transitional Citizenship does not override states’ sovereign right to set the rules for entry, residence, employment, taxation, and the naturalisation of foreign nationals. The aim is not to create new stateless persons, but to create an interim status between a former and a future nationality.

The specific legal design must be worked out by international experts and states. This petition asks that such work begin; it does not presume its outcome.

5. Who Needs This

Conscientious objection

On paper, this is among the most strongly protected rights in international law. It is derived from Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Article 4(2) of the Covenant expressly prohibits any derogation from Article 18, even during a state of emergency.

In practice, the protection works differently.

Recognition came late, and only through resistance. The European Court of Human Rights held that objection to military service on grounds of conscience is protected under Article 9 of the Convention only in 2011 — in Bayatyan v. Armenia, and only by decision of the Grand Chamber. Two years earlier, in 2009, a Chamber of the same court, in the same case, had found no violation. The dispute over interpretation lasted roughly forty-five years.

Recognition on paper does not mean access in practice. Turkey still has not introduced alternative service, despite the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling in Ülke v. Turkey (2006). In South Korea, roughly nineteen thousand objectors passed through prison before alternative service became available, following a 2018 Constitutional Court ruling. Eritrea’s open-ended national service makes no provision for objection at all.

The decision is made by an interested party. Conscientious objector status is granted by a commission within the executive branch of the very state seeking to conscript the person. The applicant must prove the sincerity of their beliefs, while the criteria, deadlines, composition of the commission, and appeal procedure are all set by the conscripting state.

States can reverse course. According to documentation from the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection (EBCO) and Forum 18, access to alternative service has, in a number of states, been suspended during mobilisation or martial law — even though Article 18 formally admits no derogation. An executive decision has, in practice, outweighed a binding international treaty.

A right that is recognised late, is not available everywhere, is assessed by the interested party, and is suspended precisely when it becomes needed is not a guarantee. And even where it does work, it describes an exemption from a single obligation, not an exit from the relationship that produces that obligation. As long as the only way out is someone else’s nationality, a person remains bound by that relationship regardless of what Article 18 says.

A Sudden Shift in State Policy

A person may be born into a state whose values they accept, only to witness, years later, a radical shift in its domestic or foreign policy. They may not wish to take part in that shift, to support it, or to be associated with it as a citizen — yet their nationality was fixed long before they were able to make that choice for themselves.

State Policy Affecting a Person’s Body and Life

On 3 July 2024, Japan’s Supreme Court ruled the country’s Eugenic Protection Law, in force from 1948 to 1996, unconstitutional. Under that law, roughly 25,000 people were sterilised, most of them people with disabilities; around 16,500 without their consent, some without their knowledge. The Court held that the law violated Article 13 of the Constitution, on respect for individual dignity, and declined to apply the twenty-year statute of limitations, calling it contrary to the principle of justice. In October 2024, the Diet issued a formal apology and passed a compensation law.

What matters here is not only the violation itself. This was not a dictatorship or a colonial administration, but a stable democracy with functioning courts and a free press — and the law remained in force for nearly fifty years, until 1996. Comparable programmes existed in Sweden (roughly 63,000 people, 1935–1976) and in a number of other European states.

Nationality is not the cause of such policies. What the example shows is something else: state policy can affect a person in the most direct and physical way, and remain lawful for decades, while disagreeing with it gives a person, by itself, no way to end their nationality.

A Personal Decision

None of this requires war, persecution, or an emergency to exist at all. A person may simply reach a considered decision that they no longer wish to continue the legal bond of nationality with the state whose national they became at birth. Why should acting on that decision require another state’s permission first?

6. What This Changes for States

Nationality by birth is today almost the only legal relationship a person cannot exit unilaterally. A state is under no obligation to confirm that a person actually wants to remain within it.

A voluntary transitional status creates a feedback loop: states gain an incentive not only to attract new nationals, but to retain their own. Over time, this could encourage:

—    higher-quality public services;

—    investment in education and healthcare;

—    improved public safety;

—    fewer corrupt and administrative barriers;

—    better conditions for work and entrepreneurship;

—    a more accountable relationship between the state and its nationals’ rights and interests.

Such a mechanism could also ease migration pressure: a person would no longer need to become an emigrant immediately just to end their nationality. They could change their international legal status while continuing to reside lawfully where they already are, and only later decide which state will become their permanent nationality.

These effects are a hypothesis that calls for dedicated international research — not a guaranteed outcome.

7. Responses to the Main Objections

“This will create new stateless persons.”
The opposite is true. Today, a person with no lawful way out chooses between keeping an unwanted nationality and resorting to unlawful routes. A transitional status means a document, a registry, and protection where none currently exist.

“Who would issue the documents and protect these people?”
Modelling this on the 1951 and 1954 Conventions would be the wrong approach: under those conventions, the document is issued by the host state. That would simply shift the dependency from the state of origin to the host state — the same bottleneck under a different name. Transitional Citizenship should remove this dependency altogether: neither renunciation processed by the state of origin, nor a document issued by the host state, but issuance by the international body itself, independent of both.

A precedent for this already exists and has functioned for decades. The United Nations Laissez-Passer is a travel document issued directly by the UN Secretariat (and by several specialised agencies — WHO, UNESCO, FAO — each running its own issuance system), rather than by the holder’s state of nationality. Its legal force rests on the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, to which 162 states are party: the document’s authority derives from collective recognition, not from any single national office.

Transitional Citizenship could follow the same logic: a dedicated UN body — UNHCR, for example, or a purpose-built unit — would arrange document production through contracted facilities (comparable to how ICAO’s biometric-document infrastructure already operates), with issuance carried out through that body’s own network of field offices, or by post, without involving the state whose nationality the person is leaving, and without dependence on any single host state. This removes the very possibility that the document’s existence depends on one national administration — former or current.

One step remains distinct: the termination of the former nationality as a legal fact. For now, that fact is naturally recorded by the state of origin itself, and the bottleneck persists there even once an international body is issuing the document. This step needs the same kind of firm procedural limits already set out in Article 8 of the 1997 European Convention on Nationality: applications processed within a reasonable time, decisions given in writing, and no fees that obstruct the process. A future agreement should go further and set a maximum period after which termination of nationality takes effect automatically, with the transitional status and its travel document made available regardless of whether the state of origin has completed that formality.

“This status will be used to shelter criminals, and there will be nowhere to deport them.”

Deportation to the state of nationality is not the only mechanism in existence, and the whole system does not rest on it: standard immigration practice in many states already allows deportation to a person’s last country of lawful residence, not only to their state of nationality — this is exactly how the question is handled today for stateless people and people without documents. A holder of transitional status is not exempt from this practice.

Nor does the status grant any immunity. Renouncing a former nationality does not release a person from responsibility as a resident: they remain fully subject to the laws of their country of residence, including tax obligations, on the same footing as any other foreign resident. What changes is a single element — the specific set of obligations tied to nationality of the former state disappears, not the obligations of residency itself.

“People will use this to dodge taxes and military service.”

Two kinds of obligation need to be kept apart.

Obligations already incurred are not cancelled by the end of nationality: tax debts, contractual and credit obligations, liability for acts already committed. These continue to apply, exactly as they do today when a person renounces their nationality.

Obligations arising from the status itself end together with the status. Military service duty falls into this category: it arises not from anything the person has done, but from the fact of their nationality. This is not a new principle; it is already how renunciation of nationality works across legal systems. The problem is not that leaving fails to end the duty to serve. It is that leaving is not available.

If ending one’s nationality did not end the obligations that flow from that nationality, the proposed status would serve no purpose. The terms and procedure for settling obligations already incurred are for the future agreement itself to determine, but the principle separating these two categories must be built into its foundation.

“States will never agree to this.”

In 1922, a comparable step was taken by 52 states — under far less favourable conditions, and without the international legal infrastructure that exists today.

8. Our Demands

We, the undersigned, call on:

—    the UN Human Rights Council to instruct the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to prepare an analytical report on the practical realisability of the right to change one’s nationality, guaranteed under Article 15(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

—    UNHCR to place the question of an interim international status on its statelessness agenda;

—    UN member states to launch an intergovernmental expert process to design a mechanism for Transitional Citizenship.

The purpose of such a process is to find a legal design that, at once:

—    creates no new stateless persons;

—    allows a person to voluntarily end their nationality;

—    grants them an internationally recognised legal status;

—    preserves states’ sovereign right to regulate entry, residence, and naturalisation;

—    allows the person to subsequently choose a new, permanent nationality.

The existing system protecting against statelessness does not need to be repealed. It needs to be supplemented with a third option: not remaining a state’s national against one’s will, not becoming stateless, but holding a temporary, internationally recognised status and choosing one’s own future nationality.

Birth determines our first nationality. It should not determine it for life.

Sources
—    Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 15 (United Nations) — https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

—    Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, 1961 — full text (OHCHR) — https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-reduction-statelessness

—    1961 Convention — objectives and key provisions (UNHCR) — https://www.unhcr.org/publications/objectives-and-key-provisions-1961-convention-reduction-statelessness

—    Global State of Citizenship report (GLOBALCIT, European University Institute) — https://globalgovernanceprogramme.eui.eu/global-state-of-citizenship-report/

—    GLOBALCIT Citizenship Law Dataset — 191 states — https://globalcit.eu/databases/globalcit-citizenship-law-dataset/

—    A century of mobility: the history of refugee travel documents (UNHCR) — https://www.unhcr.org/blogs/a-century-of-mobility-a-glimpse-into-the-history-of-refugee-travel-documents/

—    The Nansen passport — background (The Conversation) — https://theconversation.com/the-nansen-passport-the-innovative-response-to-the-refugee-crisis-that-followed-the-russian-revolution-85487

—    OHCHR and conscientious objection to military service — https://www.ohchr.org/en/conscientious-objection

—    Conscientious Objection to Military Service — OHCHR publication — https://www.ohchr.org/en/publications/special-issue-publications/conscientious-objection-military-service

—    United Nations Laissez-Passer — issuance and legal basis (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_laissez-passer

—    European Convention on Nationality, 1997, Article 8 — full text — https://www.worldlii.org/int/other/COETS/1997/3.html

—    Bayatyan v. Armenia, ECtHR Grand Chamber, 2011 — conscientious objection under Article 9 — https://co-guide.info/jurisprudence/case-bayatyan-v-armenia-application-no-2345903

—    European Bureau for Conscientious Objection (EBCO) — annual reports — https://ebco-beoc.org/

—    Japan Supreme Court rules forced sterilisation law unconstitutional, July 2024 (CNN) — https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/04/asia/japan-supreme-court-sterilization-eugenics-intl-hnk

—    Supreme Court ruling on forced sterilizations under Japan’s Eugenics Protection Law — background and aftermath — https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169%2Fintljofdissocjus.5.1.0006

—    New compensation law for former Eugenic Protection Act victims, October 2024 (DPI-Japan) — https://dpi-japan.org/en/2024/10/23/2024-ex-eugenic-protection-act-new-compensation-law/