Keynote Speech of Barbara von Rütte

On 21th October 2024, following the Annual General Assembly, a SNyMS Member Barbara von Rütte will deliver an open to public presentation entitled 'The Right to Have Rights? The Right to Citizenship in a Migration Context.'

Barbara von Rütte indicates that the existence of an enforceable right to citizenship is often disputed. States regularly oppose the adoption of concrete rights in the domain of nationality, arguing that membership in the nation state falls within states’ domaine réservé. This is despite the fact that the right to citizenship – or nationality – has been enshrined in Article 15 UDHR and is addressed in all major human rights treaties. States have been successful in rejecting concrete obligations, namely in a migration context where individuals concerned might not be stateless, but lack an effective nationality. In particular, the right to access citizenship in a specific state is rejected with the argument that the right to nationality lacks an addressee which would be obliged to respect, protect of fulfil it. In her work, Barbara explores what role citizenship, belonging and access to rights play for migrants and challenge a sovereignty-centered interpretation of the right to citizenship. She argues that the right to citizenship should be strengthened on the basis of the principle of jus nexi, in order to offer effective protection for migrants’ human rights.

Barbara von Rütte is a Postdoc at the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland). After her studies in international and European Law at the Universities of Bern (Switzerland) and Leiden (Netherlands), she has been a PhD researcher at the University of Bern within the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research NCCR – on the move and a post- doctoral research fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (Germany). Her research focuses on citizenship, nationality, statelessness and belonging. Her broader research interests include Swiss constitutional and migration law, discrimination and intersectionality as well as international human rights law. Her monograph “The Human Right to Citizenship. Situating the Right to Citizenship within International and Regional Human Rights Law” has been published with Brill in 2022. Since 2020 she is a member of the Swiss Federal Commission on Migration and serves as a book review editor for the Statelessness and Citizenship review. She is admitted to the Bar of Zurich (Switzerland).