| Summary: | The main ambition of this paper has been to examine the ways in which dual citizenships sometimes can become a problem in relation to obtaining human rights. More specifically, to delimit the work, the focus has been put on individuals with dual citizenships in the need of consular assistance. Even though consular assistance itself cannot claim to be a human right, it can help a state to maintain human rights to its citizens, even when abroad. It may be about assisting a citizen in a legal process and/or trying to ensure that things goes right in conjunction with a deprivation of liberty, for example. To further delimit the work two specific countries have been chosen for the study, namely Iran and Sweden. When a person living in Sweden, for example, is visiting in Iran and at the same time have citizenships in both Sweden and Iran, and then comes in need of consular assistance from Sweden, problems may occur. Because of international law etc., Sweden cannot assist this individual in the same way as an individual with only a Swedish citizenship who also is in the need of consular assistance in Iran. Dual citizenship can instead in different ways result in serious consequences abroad, such as in the case of the Swedish-Iranian citizen Ahmadreza Djalali who currently, on vague grounds, is at risk of the death penalty in Iran. The conclusions drawn in this paper is that an individual, because of dual citizenships, sometimes can lose fundamental human rights. To illustrate this even further, citizenship theories mainly by Hannah Arendt and Seyla Benhabib, has been used to exemplify how citizenship still may be significant when it comes to obtaining human rights, similar to Arendt’s well-known theories about how the lack of citizenship causes you to lose human rights. But instead how dual citizenship also, in some cases, causes you to lose human rights. The results implied that something needs to be done in this area but also that it is not an easy task to handle. Exactly how this can be solved is still unclear, but most likely something has to be done on a larger global level. The old frameworks that regulates both consular assistance and citizenship needs to be updated and adapted to our increasingly globalized world.
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