Law Commons^™

Statelessness And Roma Communities In The Czech Republic: Competing Theories Of State Compliance, Robyn Linde

Faculty Publications

This paper examines the Czech Republic’s passage in 1993 of a citizenship law that rendered approximately 10,000 to 25,000 members of the Roma community stateless. The Czech Republic, a former satellite state of the Soviet Union, peacefully split from the Slovak Republic with the dissolution of the Czechoslovak Federal Republic (hereafter Czechoslovakia) in 1993, a process known as the Velvet Divorce. Following the dissolution, a new citizenship law came into effect that put steep requirements on individuals who wished to gain or retain Czech citizenship. These requirements included verification of a five-year period of residence, a clean criminal record, and …