an arbitrary violation of the right of the victims to nationality. According to
the Complainant, the discriminatory acts reported above led to the denial of
the right to nationality, and in many instances to statelessness or to the risk of
statelessness, thus preventing the recognition of the legal status of thousands
of Ivorians. The Complainant establishes the right of the Dioula population to
Ivorian nationality based on history. Thus, he argues that as a result of
artificial borders splitting homogeneous cultural groups and regrouping
different peoples within several independent States, the post-independent
borders have undermined the natural process of creating nation States and
caused a heterogeneity which has given vent to ethnocentrism. The
Complainant asserts that this historical foundation of the right to nationality
is confirmed by the accounts of the victims interviewed of which 78 percent
were born in Côte d’Ivoire, with parents and grand-parents themselves born
in Côte d’Ivoire, the only country they have ever known, the only country
with which they have ever had socio-political links and where all the
members of their families live.
63. The Complainant asserts that on violation of the right to nationality according
to the provisions of Article 5 of the Charter, the law is vague, its
implementation discriminatory and the procedure for acquiring nationality
inequitable. On the vagueness of the law, the Complainant affirms that the
nationality Code fails to clarify two terms whose definition is crucial to
ensure an equitable and transparent implementation: « Ivorian » and
« foreigner». The Complainant asserts that at independence, there were no
Ivorian citizens in Côte d’Ivoire, just as it pertained in several other African
States. In Côte d’Ivoire, the authorities gave the regular residents a timeline of
one year to acquire the nationality, a deadline which many residents could
not comply with nor deemed it necessary to comply with. The myth was
therefore perpetuated, from generation to generation, that Ivorian nationality
was only given before independence or in the period after independence.
64. On the allegation of denial of nationality as a result of the inequitable
implementation of the law, the Complainant refers to the lack of standardized
processes and motivation for follow-up of applications submitted and the
unpredictability of the procedure for acquiring nationality. The Complainant
stresses that whereas the Ivorian law on nationality is governed by the
principle of jus sanguinis – to have at least one Ivorian parent – the law in
question does not set any concrete standard to determine the validity of the
nationality of parents. Furthermore, according to the evidence provided by
witnesses, in case the nationality documents of their parents filed alongside
the application for nationality or naturalization did not disappear from the
administrative processes, they were simply rejected without any reason. The
attempts to renew previously acquired documents ended the same way.
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