Article 15: Right to a nationality; not to be arbitrarily deprived of it
Independent
This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
Why shareholder democracy is independent
This right belongs to governments, courts and international bodies such as UNHCR, not to corporate shareholders. Statelessness is created and ended by nationality law: birthright citizenship rules, discriminatory citizenship statutes, and state decisions to strip or restore documentation, as in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Businesses operating in affected regions can use their voice or adjust investment practices, but this is advocacy at the margins, not a lever that changes who counts as a citizen. Even 'golden passport' programs, where private firms broker citizenship-by-investment for wealthy applicants, are run under agreements with sovereign governments. Those governments decide them, and increasingly so do courts such as the European Court of Justice, which found Malta's scheme unlawful. Shareholders voting at a public company have no comparable mechanism to award or withhold anyone's nationality, so this right sits outside the reach of shareholder democracy.
How this was scoredIndependent
Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
Granting, recognizing, denaturalizing or restoring citizenship is an act of state law, courts and international bodies; no company's product, employment practice or supply chain decides who holds a nationality or becomes stateless.
Three separate adversarial searches (corporate lobbying on statelessness, on nationality/denaturalization law, and on citizenship-by-investment 'golden passport' schemes) found no documented corporate political campaign for or against this right.
0 and 0, higher of the two, gives Independent
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
No shareholder advocacy found yet
We looked and found nothing that met our standard, which is a source we opened and confirmed. Nationality is conferred and withdrawn by states under nationality law, and citizenship-by-investment schemes are operated under sovereign agreements. The ICCR page fetched returned navigation content only, so it could not confirm either way, but no shareholder proposal, investor letter or coalition engagement on statelessness or arbitrary deprivation of nationality was located. Shareholder advocacy that touches adjacent ground (private immigration detention operators, digital identity systems) addresses different rights and was not recorded here because it does not bear on who holds a nationality.
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.