The Place of Custom in Citizenship Rights

Jurists and legal experts allocate a special role and value to custom and use particular interpretatons to explain its place. Undoubtedly, customs, traditions and norms have gradually turned into social values or paved the ground for their formation. Transformation of the variables related to conventions and customs like life conditions of human beings, development and progress, cultural changes, the emergence of new ideas and the like leads to an increase of its impact on various issues like citizenship rights. The current study seeks to investigate the complementary role of conventions and customs as one of the influential sources of legal codes of society and its relationship with citizenship rights. Conventions and customs, on the one hand, can play a positive role in the formation of citizenship rights and in those cases that law cannot predict all the needs of human beings serve as a vehicle to complement and cover up the deficiencies through providing new interpretations. Sometimes the legislator changes the conventions into a law by a number of modifications. On the other hand, it can also be an obstacle or play a negative role; in such cases, the law steps in and nullifies the convention and rejects it. In other words, as long as the necessity of paying attention to citizenship rights does not turn into a dominant norm, legal mechanisms will face a difficult path ahead.