W&L Law Professor David Baluarte on ISIS and Statelessness Baluarte was quoted extensively in a Feb. 22 story in the New York Times on the cases of Hoda Muthana and Shamima Begum.
“We are bringing ourselves back to a place where we have forgotten how desperate the situation of statelessness was. And having this new wave of politically motivated expatriation is really troubling.”
Washington and Lee law professor David Baluarte, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic and an expert on statelessness, contributed to a New York Times report examining what will happen to those individuals, such as Alabama college student Hoda Muthana, who left their home countries to join ISIS and face being stripped of their nationality in their attempts to return home.
In addition to detailing the cases of Muthana and British citizen Shamima Begum, the story delves into the history of statelessness and how many countries, both through international treaties and domestic law, have rejected revoking citizenship as a form of persecution or punishment for crimes. These efforts largely developed as a response to the Nazi practice of stripping Germany’s Jews of citizenship before sending them to concentration camps.
Read the complete article on the New York Times website.
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