1. Lack of Legal Safeguards Against Childhood Statelessness
Viet Nam’s citizenship law explicitly provides that foundling children will be considered citizens. For children born to stateless parents, the parents must have a ‘permanent residence’ in Viet Nam for the child to gain citizenship. Persons deemed temporarily residing in the country appear to be excluded by this provision and the application of the provision, and the application for persons illegally residing within the country remains unclear. A stateless person can only apply for a confirmation of permanent residence in Viet Nam if that person has “temporarily resided” in Viet Nam since 2000 or earlier. To apply for the confirmation of permanent residence, the applicant must submit to the local police the relevant temporary residence certificates issued by the competent authority of Viet Nam to prove his or her temporary residence in Viet Nam since 2002 or earlier. If both parents of a child born in Viet Nam are stateless and not qualified to have permanent residence in Viet Nam, there would not be any legal basis for the child to acquire Vietnamese nationality.
2. Citizenship Stripping
In principle, a Vietnamese citizen cannot be stripped of their Vietnamese nationality unless they are a Vietnamese national living overseas or a naturalized citizen who has committed acts that are harmful to the state of Viet Nam.
Due to barriers to dual nationality in the laws of receiving countries including South Korea and Taiwan, marriage migrants from Viet Nam had to relinquish citizenship to naturalize as citizens. As discussed in the chapters on China and South Korea, where a relationship is determined to be a ‘sham’ or fraudulent, women have been stripped of their nationality without protections from statelessness. While the exact number of persons affected by citizenship stripping is unknown, the CEDAW noted in 2015 that there were 800 stateless returned marriage migrants in Viet Nam. However, Article 23 of the Law on Vietnamese Nationality provides that anyone who has renounced Vietnamese citizenship to gain citizenship elsewhere is eligible to reacquire Vietnamese citizenship and many of these women have been able to do so.
3. Administrative Barriers
In order to apply for restoration of Vietnamese nationality, a person must submit the judicial record issued by the provincial Department of Justice of the province where he or she is residing or to the diplomatic representative office in the foreign country where he or she is residing. However, while the legislation on judicial records sets out the procedures for Vietnamese or foreign nationals to obtain the judicial records from competent Vietnamese authorities, there is no guidance on how a stateless person can do so, presenting a barrier for stateless persons to restore their Vietnamese nationality.
A birth certificate, people’s identity card, or a Vietnamese passport may be used to certify Vietnamese citizenship. Children cannot access education in Viet Nam without a birth certificate. While Viet Nam’s birth registration rate is high, at 98%, some groups experience disproportionately low birth registration. Those at risk of non-registration (and, in turn, at risk of statelessness) in Viet Nam include children born in remote areas, children born to ethnic and religious minorities, street children in urban areas, undocumented migrant families who are not registered under the “household registration system”, children born out of wedlock (especially to parents under the legal age for marriage), children born to two older siblings due to the unofficial “two-child policy” and associated social stigma, and children with undetermined nationality.
Ethnic H’mong communities continue to face administrative barriers to accessing civil registration documents and citizenship with reports of discriminatory applications of policy among these communities. It has been reported that the denial of documentation and the implementation of administrative barriers have been utilized to discriminate against ethnic H’mong on the ground of their conversion to Christian faith and to deny as many 10,000 ethnic H’mong citizenship. Without access to civil registration, these groups largely do not have the documentation required to prove their identity or nationality or access basic human rights and services.