Citizenship and state succession in the Sudans
Published: 19/Dec/2011
Source: Open Society Foundation
By Bronwen Manby On July 9, 2011, the Republic of South Sudan became Africa’s newest independent state. Among the many issues that were supposed to have been resolved before the formal secession of the new state—in fact, before the January 9 referendum that approved its creation—was the question of citizenship, and the rules for determining who would become a member of the new entity. This never happened. The legal drafting issues are quite technical, but fundamentally the problem was lack of political will; above all a refusal by the Khartoum government to continue to consider the several hundred thousand “southerners” resident in the north—some of them for decades, many of them born there—as citizens of the Republic of Sudan. Link to Open Society Foundations website.