elimination of statelessness”. In 1951, the Commission duly initiated work on the topic, for which it appointed one of its members, Manley O. Hudson, as special rapporteur. Hudson immediately contacted UNHCR, which had offered to assist the ILC in its work, and was provided with the services of Dr. Paul Weis who subsequently devoted seven weeks to working with the special rapporteur. Hudson’s resultant report made the following observation on the distinction between de jure and de facto statelessness in the Study of Statelessness: Such a distinction may have been useful for the purpose for which the study was made; it has, however, no place in the present paper. Stateless persons in the legal sense of the term are persons who are not considered as nationals by any State according to its law. The so-called stateless persons are de facto nationals of a State who are outside of its territory and devoid of its protection; they are, therefore, not stateless: it might be better to speak of “unprotected persons” and to call this group “de facto unprotected persons”, in distinction to “de jure unprotected persons”, i.e., stateless persons. Refugees may be stateless or not; in the first case they are de jure unprotected persons; in the latter de facto unprotected.37 Although considering that the ILC’s terms of reference extended only to de jure statelessness, Hudson remarked that a purely technical solution to de jure statelessness which does not take account of the need for a genuine improvement in the status of the person concerned could lead to a shift from de jure statelessness to, despite the observation quoted above, what he nevertheless called de facto statelessness: Any attempt to eliminate statelessness can only be considered as fruitful if it results not only in the attribution of a nationality to individuals, but also in an improvement of their status. As a rule, such an improvement will be achieved only if the nationality of the individual is the nationality of that State with which he is, in fact, most closely connected, his "effective nationality", if it ensures for the national the enjoyment of those rights which are attributed to nationality under international law, and the enjoyment of that status which results from nationality under municipal law. Purely formal solutions which do not take account of this desideratum might reduce the number of stateless persons but not the number of unprotected persons. They might lead to a shifting from statelessness de jure to statelessness de facto which, in the view of the Rapporteur, would not be desirable. (Cf. the proceedings of the International Law Association at its 39th Conference in Paris in 1936, where it was suggested that neither jus soli nor jus sanguinis should be decisive but the jus connectionis or right of attachment, i.e., a person should have the nationality of the State to which he has proved to be most closely attached in his conditions of life as may be concluded from spiritual and material circumstances).38 Hudson resigned after having submitted his report but was succeeded in his role as special rapporteur by Roberto Cordova. Unlike Hudson, Cordova made a special plea that the ILC address the situation of de facto stateless persons, emphasizing that everyone should have an effective right to a nationality: 35. […] Some members might think that the problem of de facto statelessness does not fall within the Commission's terms of reference and that, therefore, the Special Rapporteur oversteps his instructions in dealing with this most cruel and inhuman situation. They might think that de facto statelessness is not a juridical problem since the persons concerned have not been deprived of their nationality and therefore are not, stricto sensu and juridically speaking, stateless. To a certain extent, of course, this contention is valid; but, on the other hand, a right which cannot be exercised is not a positive one, and the Special Rapporteur submits that what human beings are entitled to possess is a positive, an effective, right of nationality. 37 38 International Law Commission, “Report on Nationality, Including Statelessness by Mr. Manley O. Hudson, Special Rapporteur”, A/CN.4/50, 1952, p. 17. “Report on Nationality, Including Statelessness by Mr. Manley O. Hudson, Special Rapporteur”, op. cit., p. 20. 12