Report on citizenship law : Ecuador

Abstract

Citizenship is the legal status through which states establish who their members are. Thanks to this mechanism, a sharp division is established between non-members – foreigners – and members – citizens. As Rogers Brubaker (1992: 46) points out, the two categories are “correlative, mutually exclusive, exhaustive.” With the status of citizen, a person not only is permanently linked to a particular state but also acquires a set of rights and duties. In the course of history, each state has developed its own particular conception of citizenship and it has worked as a fundamental tool to maintain “the intergenerational continuity of the state” (Vink and Bauböck 2013). In particular, this tool has helped to regulate the transmission of membership to new generations and the admittance of new members when international migration takes place.