RAMADAN v. MALTA JUDGMENT – SEPARATE OPINION 31 circumstances, nor does it address the subject of retroactively granting citizenship to all currently stateless persons. Stateless persons may take the citizenship of the place of their birth or of the place where they were found in the case of a foundling, or they may take the citizenship of one of their parents24. States shall not deprive people of their citizenship so as to render them stateless, with the exceptions of cases where citizenship has been acquired by misrepresentation or fraud, or of “disloyalty” to the State. 5. The Executive Committee of the UNHCR, concerned with the precarious conditions faced by stateless persons and the persistence of statelessness in various regions of the world, has consistently urged States to ratify the 1954 and 1961 Conventions in its numerous conclusions25. It has also dedicated two conclusions exclusively to statelessness, namely Conclusion No. 78 on Prevention and Reduction of Stateless Persons, from 1995, and Conclusion No. 106 on Identification, Prevention and Reduction of Statelessness and Protection of Stateless Persons, from 2006. The Executive Committee’s Conclusion No. 106 covers the UNHCR’s four dimensions of the Statelessness regime, namely the identification, prevention and reduction of statelessness and the protection of stateless persons. Under the heading of protection of stateless persons, the Executive Committee requests States to “give consideration to acceding to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and, in regard to States Parties, to consider lifting reservations” and to those States which are not yet parties to the 1954 Convention to “treat stateless persons lawfully residing on their territory in accordance with international human rights law; and to consider, as appropriate, facilitating the naturalization of habitually and lawfully residing stateless persons in accordance with national legislation”. It further asks States “not to detain stateless persons on the sole basis of their being stateless and to treat them in accordance with international human rights law” and also calls on States Parties to the 1954 Convention to fully implement its provisions. 6. While it is a clear tenet of international law that each State has the sovereign responsibility to determine under national law who are its citizens, that role is subject to international principles. In its Draft Articles on Nationality of Natural Persons in relation to the Succession of States, the International Law Commission (ILC) indicated that “the competence of States in this field may be exercised only within the limits set by international law”26. Citizenship can be acquired automatically by operation of law, at birth or at a later stage, or as a result of an act of the 24. UN Human Rights Council, “Impact of the arbitrary deprivation of nationality”, cited above, paras. 10 to 15. 25. See a compilation of relevant extracts in UNHCR Executive Committee Conclusions related to Statelessness, July 2010. 26. Yearbook of the International Law Commission, 1999, vol. II (2), p. 24.