Foreword 6 A central objective of laws and legal institutions in any society is to promote rule of law, rights, and justice. Their failure to do so is of serious concern to all its members. When it disproportionately impacts the poor, marginalised and oppressed groups in society, it is a matter that demands special attention. In that instance it is the urgent duty of the legal community, among others, to ascertain if existing laws are being respected and to suggest reforms that may be needed in order to avoid troubling outcomes. This solemn responsibility is at least one important reason that law school education is considered incomplete if students do not engage with, both in classrooms and clinics, the social and legal conditions of subaltern groups in society. One such group is that of precarious citizens and stateless persons: the former category indicates a situation of uncertainty with respect to an individual’s citizenship status. The condition of these two groups is that of the most wretched of the earth. As the idea of Westphalia has come to colonise planet Earth the inalienable rights of man have come to be inextricably linked with the acquisition of nationality. To be stateless is to have, as Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben have pointed out, a bare existence which represents the antithesis of a life of security and dignity. Indeed, the concepts and rights of human security and dignity are empty without securing a universal right of nationality. Therefore, over the last century, the international community has set the goal of eliminating statelessness. Toward this end it has adopted two conventions viz., the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Besides there are several core international declarations and conventions on human rights with provisions that guarantee a right to nationality. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that ‘everyone has the right to a nationality’ and perhaps more significantly that ‘no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his SECURING CITIZENSHIP