Prof Susan Kneebone, Brandais York & Sayomi Ariyawansa

The second in the Statelessness Seminar Series 2018 took place on 9 August 2018 with a presentation by Professor Susan Kneebone and PhD students, Brandais York and Sayomi Ariyawansa, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne.

“Children of ‘Cross Border Marriages’ and Nationality in Can Tho, Mekong Delta, Vietnam”

This seminar presents the preliminary findings on data collection on the situation of bi-racial children born from international marriages between Vietnamese women and fathers in South Korea and Taiwan, who are returned to Vietnam following a failed marriage. This work is part of the larger ARC project ’Development of a Legal Framework for Regulation of International Marriage Migration’.  A key concern of this data collection is to evaluate the rights of the children in light of the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, especially Articles 7 and 8, which contain provisions which confer independent rights of nationality and identity upon a child. The seminar will explain the laws and regulation of nationality in Vietnam, and the different legal and contextual situations of the children, many of whom are de facto statelessness in in Vietnam. We will examine the effectiveness of central and local regulation of the rights of the children.