460 Melbourne University Law Review [Vol 40:456 nationality, state succession and territorial changes, barriers to birth and other civil registration procedures, administrative oversight, renunciation of one nationality without acquiring another, being born to a stateless person, marriage or divorce, and denationalisation.15 In the view of one leading scholar, the ‘primary injustice’ experienced by stateless persons ‘is not that they cannot find a state to grant them citizenship but that the state which should grant them citizenship will, for various reasons, not do so.’16 As Blitz and Lynch have noted, although many stateless persons effectively ‘struggle to exist’,17 the conferral of citizenship on once-stateless populations offers ‘very real and important material and non-material benefits at both the community and individual levels.’18 Yet in many countries, including Australia, there is no formal mechanism in place to identify stateless persons. While some may be discovered through the refugee status determination process, others may go undetected. Even when a stateless person is identified, there is no domestic legal status that attaches unless he or she is also recognised as a refugee or beneficiary of complementary protection. As such, he or she may be at risk of indefinite detention, or only be eligible for a temporary visa with a limited set of entitlements.19 15 See generally Laura van Waas, Nationality Matters: Statelessness under International Law (Intersentia, 2008); Hélène Lambert, Refugee Status, Arbitrary Deprivation of Nationality, and Statelessness within the Context of Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention and Its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, UN Doc PPLA/2014/01 (October 2014) 14 <http://www.unhcr.org/5433f0f09.html>; P Weis, Nationality and Statelessness in International Law (Sijthoff and Noordhoff, 2nd ed, 1979); UNHCR, ‘Gender Equality Background Note’, above n 14. 16 Matthew J Gibney, ‘Statelessness and the Right to Citizenship’ (2009) 32 Forced Migration Review 50, 50. 17 Maureen Lynch and Brad K Blitz, ‘Summary and Conclusions’ in Brad K Blitz and Maureen Lynch (eds), Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nationality (Edward Elgar, 2011) 194, 195. 18 Ibid 203. See also Lindsey N Kingston and Kathryn R Stam, ‘Recovering from Statelessness: Resettled Bhutanese-Nepali and Karen Refugees Reflect on the Lack of Legal Nationality’ (2016) Journal of Human Rights (forthcoming). 19 See the discussion in Foster, McAdam and Wadley, above n 6.

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