410 Melbourne University Law Review [Vol 40:401 they are or that they have links to any country.46 Without a nationality, a person may be unable to buy and sell property, open a bank account, pay taxes, legally marry or register the birth of a child.47 The predicament of stateless children has garnered particular international attention in recent years.48 The UNHCR estimates that there is ‘a stateless child being born … at least every 10 minutes’, and observes that the effects of being born stateless are profound especially in terms of access to the most basic of human rights such as medical care.49 Statelessness can also be a precursor to, or a root cause of, forced or irregular migration or trafficking, as recently acknowledged in the 2016 Bali Declaration on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Transnational Crime.50 Given that such populations commonly lack identity documentation, legal recognition and protection from their state of origin or former habitual residence, they are often unable to return. This is why it is so important that countries of asylum establish a credible system for identifying and ensuring that a protective status is granted to stateless persons in accordance with international law. I II T H E I N T E R NAT I O NA L L E G A L F R A M E WO R K A N D A U S T R A L IA ’ S O B L I G AT I O N S The two core treaties pertinent to statelessness are the 1954 Convention and the 1961 Convention. The majority of stateless persons live in the country of their birth or long-term residence and have never crossed an international border. This means that the answer to their predicament is more likely to 46 Sophie Nonnenmacher and Ryszard Cholewinski, ‘The Nexus between Statelessness and Migration’ in Alice Edwards and Laura van Waas (eds), Nationality and Statelessness under International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014) 247, 254–6; Batchelor, ‘Statelessness and the Problem of Resolving Nationality Status’, above n 1, 159. 47 Nicole Green and Todd Pierce, ‘Combatting Statelessness: A Government Perspective’ (2009) 32 Forced Migration Review 34, 34; Achiron and Govil, above n 45, 5. 48 See, eg, UNHCR, I Am Here, I Belong: The Urgent Need to End Childhood Statelessness (UNHCR Division of International Protection, 2015); Jacqueline Bhabha (ed), Children without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge (MIT Press, 2011); Guidelines on Statelessness No 4, UN Doc HCR/GS/12/04; Maureen Lynch and Melanie Teff, ‘Childhood Statelessness’ (2009) 32 Forced Migration Review 31. 49 UNHCR, I Am Here, I Belong, above n 48, 1. 50 Bali Declaration on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, Sixth Ministerial Conference of the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime (23 March 2016) 2 [4]. We thank Nicholas Oakeshott for this reference.