The Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Status of Stateless Persons spent a considerable amount of time discussing who should be considered stateless for purposes of the Statelessness Convention. Issues included: • • • • Whether the Convention should only apply to persons becoming stateless as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951;52 Whether the Convention should exclude persons already covered by the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees;53 Whether the Convention’s definition of stateless persons should explicitly include persons whose nationality status is indeterminate (for example because the country with which such persons have links declines to reply to inquiries whether they are its nationals);54 Whether the Convention should apply to de facto stateless persons as well as to de jure stateless persons, and if so, how broadly de facto stateless persons should be defined for purposes of the Convention. Ultimately all four questions were answered in the negative, and the final definition of stateless persons for purposes of the Convention encompassed only “persons not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”,55 whom the Conference referred to as de jure stateless. However, reference to de facto stateless persons was not dropped altogether since the Conference recommended in its Final Act that each Contracting State, when it recognizes as valid the reasons for which a person has renounced the protection of the State of which he is a national, consider sympathetically the possibility of according to that person the treatment which the Convention accords to stateless persons; and […] further that, in cases where the State in whose territory the person resides has decided to accord the treatment referred to above, other Contracting States also accord him the treatment provided for by the Convention. UNHCR has made a number of statements about this recommendation that are not entirely accurate. For example, according to Nationality and Statelessness: A Handbook for Parliamentarians: 52 53 54 55 See United Kingdom proposal in E/CONF.17/L.1 and Australian proposal in E/CONF.17/L.2. The proposals are discussed E/CONF.17/SR.2, E/CONF.17/SR.3 and E/CONF.17/SR.4. See United Kingdom proposal, E/CONF.17/L.1: “Article 1: For the purpose of this Protocol the term ‘stateless persons’ means persons who are not considered as nationals by any State according to its law. Article 2: 1. This Protocol shall apply to stateless persons who are not refugees within the meaning of Article 1 of the Convention [relating to the Status of Refugees]. This Protocol shall not apply to stateless persons coming within the terms of Sections D, E or F of Article 1 of the Convention.” See also the later proposals of the United Kingdom at E/CONF.17/L.21 and E/CONF.17/L.21/Rev.1, by which time it had provisionally been agreed by the Conference to include de facto stateless persons as well as de jure stateless persons in the Convention’s definition of a stateless person. As the United Kingdom representative explained at E/CON.17/SR.13, pp. 13 - 14, under these latter proposals the exclusion of refugees from the Statelessness Convention would only apply to 1951 Convention refugees who are de facto stateless, not to 1951 refugees who are de jure stateless. Thus, the Convention would cover all de jure stateless persons, and also de facto stateless persons who are not 1951 Convention refugees. Note, however, that this does not necessarily mean that the United Kingdom representative considered that some de facto stateless persons are not refugees, since the 1951 Convention only covers persons who are refugees as a result of events occurring before 1951. It was not until the entry into force of the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees that this limitation in time in the definition of a refugee was eliminated. See also discussion in section 7 below. Article 1(1), 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. 17