Weis has similarly observed that “de facto statelessness” was a misnomer, and that it would have been more appropriate to speak of “de facto unprotected persons”.133 Hence, if it was already stretching the meaning of the term “stateless” to apply it to nationals who are devoid of external protection, it would be stretching the meaning of the term even further to apply it to nationals whose rights are violated by State or non-State actors on the territory of the State of their nationality. The broader the range of rights that are considered to attach to nationality in answer to questions (a) and (b) above, the ever more problematic it would be to conclude that persons who do not enjoy the rights attached to their nationality are de facto stateless. For example, to argue that persons who are deprived of the enjoyment of such rights are de facto stateless, and that all de facto stateless persons should be treated as de jure stateless, would be doing a grave disservice to persons who should be treated as the nationals that they are, rather than as stateless persons. Furthermore, assuming that UNHCR has a mandate for addressing de facto statelessness, then, given that the rights attached to nationality may be violated inside the country of nationality as well as outside it, UNHCR would have a mandate also for persons who remain inside the country of their nationality. The scope of such a mandate would go beyond the Office’s permitted engagement with internally displaced persons (IDPs) – which must be at the request of the Secretary-General or the competent principal organs of the United Nations, with the consent of the State concerned, and must not undermine the institution of asylum – to persons more generally, whether displaced or not.134 Aside from the questions such a mandate would raise about possible perceived interference with national sovereignty, there is also the question as to the extent to which the rights attaching to nationality would have to be violated before the persons concerned would qualify as “de facto stateless”:135 the lower the threshold required, the broader the scope of UNHCR’s mandate ratione personae would become. 136 A UNHCR mandate to address such problems would far exceed the authority currently granted to the Office by the UN General Assembly and by ExCom, and would encroach into the domain of the international protection of human rights generally. As van Waas has argued, there is no need for a special statelessness regime to address the problem of denial of rights attached to nationality as such problems are already covered by the international human rights regime.137 Hence, it is submitted that: 133 134 135 136 137 Weis, “Nationality and Statelessness in International Law”, p. 164. See, for example, para. 16 of UN General Assembly Resolution 53/125 of 9 December 1998; UNHCR, “The Protection of Internally Displaced Persons and the Role of UNHCR”, 27 February 2007, Section II. Cf. Indira Goris, Julia Harrington and Sebastien Köhn, “Statelessness: What it is and why it matters” in “Forced Migration Review”, Issue 32, April 2009, p. 4: “Although individuals who have legal citizenship and its accompanying rights may take both for granted, what they enjoy is one extreme of a continuum between full, effective citizenship and de jure statelessness, in which individuals have neither legal citizenship nor any attendant rights. In between these extremes are millions of de facto stateless persons denied effective protection.” For example, one might ask whether the violation of rights would have to amount to persecution, or whether the threshold might be lower than that. Van Waas, “Nationality Matters: Statelessness under International Law”, footnote 82 above, p. 25. 39