right to the nationality of a State but who are unable to receive it” should be considered de facto rather than de jure stateless. Nor is it clear why “persons who cannot establish their nationality” are distinguished from “persons without an effective nationality”, thus implying that de facto stateless persons comprise not only persons whose nationality is ineffective, but a second category of persons as well. Moreover, as discussed below, it may be arguable in at least some situations that “persons unable to establish their nationality” are not considered as nationals by their State of putative nationality nor any other State under the operation of its law – meaning that such persons would be de jure, not de facto, stateless. David Weissbrodt and Clay Collins rely heavily upon Batchelor but inject some human rights elements into their own description of de facto statelessness in 2006: Persons who are de facto stateless often have a nationality according to the law, but this nationality is not effective or they cannot prove or verify their nationality. De facto statelessness can occur when governments withhold the usual benefits of citizenship, such as protection, and assistance, or when persons relinquish the services, benefits, and protection of their country. Put another way, persons who are de facto stateless might have legal claim to the benefits of nationality but are not, for a variety of reasons, able to enjoy these benefits. They are, effectively, without a nationality.103 Weissbrodt and Collins later go on to say that: Although the category of de facto stateless persons is sufficiently broad to include all persons who have a citizenship yet do not receive the concomitant benefits and protection that typically accompany citizenship, the term de facto stateless is, more often than not, applied to those persons who do not enjoy the rights of citizenship enjoyed by other noncriminal citizens of the same state. Consequently, most persons considered de facto stateless are the victims of state repression. Whereas de jure statelessness can simply result from the oversight of lawmakers who leave gaps in the law through which persons can fall, de facto statelessness typically results from state discrimination.104 A footnote to the first sentence of this latter passage adds: Hence, someone is usually not said to be de facto stateless if he or she has been convicted of a crime and denied the right, for example, to vote. This tends to suggest that, according to Weissbrodt and Collins, a person may be de facto stateless even inside the country of his or her (ineffective) nationality. Some of the other scenarios that they and/or Batchelor mention similarly entail that in theory a person could be de facto stateless inside, as well as outside, the country of his or her nationality. For example, a person who is unable to establish his or her nationality could in principle be either inside or outside the country of his or her nationality.105 103 104 105 David Weissbrodt, Clay Collins, “The Human Rights of Stateless Persons”, Human Rights Quarterly 28 (2006), pp. 251 - 252. Ibid., p. 263. See James A. Goldston, “Holes in the Rights Framework: Racial Discrimination, Citizenship, and the Rights of Noncitizens” in “Ethics and International Affairs”, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2006 at p. 339 - 340: “Article 1 of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons defines statelessness as the condition of ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.’ Such a definition does not encompass the myriad situations of de facto statelessness—where persons who in principle satisfy the respective criteria of national citizenship law (for example, they are born on the territory of a state that has jus soli citizenship rules) nonetheless have no effective proof to document their citizenship. This reflects the fact that, when the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1954 Statelessness Convention were adopted, the operating assumption was that all de facto stateless persons would be outside their countries of habitual residence, and hence refugees. It was also assumed that an individual would have had to act—by, for example, fleeing her country of birth—to render herself de facto stateless. And yet, the United Nations 28