recommendation should refer only to persons who renounce the protection of their State of nationality.62 For renunciation of the protection of the State of nationality to bring a person within the scope of the recommendation, the renunciation has to be for reasons that are recognized as valid by the Contracting State concerned. This introduces an element of subjectivity into the assessment, since what is considered as a valid reason by one State may not be considered as valid by another.63 Reasons put to the Conference as not being valid are those of personal convenience, or whereby the individual concerned seeks to avoid all obligations to his or her State of nationality.64 In fact the Conference identified only one reason that it did consider valid – that is, if the individual concerned is a refugee, i.e. is outside his or her State of nationality and is unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that State owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.65 Given that the Refugee Convention had already been adopted three years earlier, this begs the question as to why there was even any discussion at the Conference about whether to include persons who renounce the protection of their State of nationality in the recommendation in its Final Act, let alone on whether to include them in the definition of a stateless person in the Statelessness Convention itself. The answer is that discussions on this point were largely driven by the concern and insistence of the Belgian delegate that only refugees who were de jure stateless would otherwise be covered by the Statelessness Convention. He thought that some States might become a party to the Statelessness Convention without also becoming a party to the Refugee Convention, and therefore that the Statelessness Convention should additionally provide for the protection of de facto stateless refugees in order to avoid a 62 63 64 65 See Danish proposal in E/CONF.17/L.25. Norway had proposed that the recommendation in the Final Act also include persons deprived of the protection of their State of nationality (E/CONF.17/SR.14 at p.4), but this proposal was not adopted. This element of subjectivity was one of the reasons why the Conference did not agree to the inclusion of de facto stateless persons within the Convention’s definition of a stateless person. See, for example, the remarks of the delegate of Yugoslavia, E/CONF.17/SR.10 at p. 11: “The idea of recognizing as a stateless person a person who invoked reasons recognized as a valid by the State in which he was a resident could not be accepted. The criteria for validity would vary greatly from State to State, and the State of origin would have no say in the matter. The idea might be incorporated in the final act as a voeu; if embodied in the instrument it would open the way to widespread abuse.” Note in particular the following comments of the delegates of Yugoslavia and Belgium: “… de facto stateless persons who refused to claim the nationality of a State and sought to enjoy the status of stateless persons in their State of residence as a means of avoiding all obligations towards that State should be excluded” (Yugoslavia, E/CONF.17/SR.3, p. 13); “If persons became [de facto] stateless for political reasons, they should be treated as refugees; if they renounced their nationality for personal convenience, they were not entitled to special protection” (E/CONF.17/SR.10, p. 11); “Care should be taken … to exclude non bona fide [de facto] stateless persons, those who renounced their nationality for personal reasons, sometimes somewhat shady ones” (Belgium, E/CONF.17/SR.4, p. 3). The Belgian delegate later added the clarification that “the main point was not renunciation of nationality but protection” (E/CONF.17/SR.10, p. 13). Note that according to the definition given in Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention refugees include not only persons with a well-founded fear of being persecuted who are unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of the country of their nationality, but also persons with a well-founded fear of being persecuted who are unable to avail themselves of such protection. The latter category of refugees would appear not to be covered by the recommendation in the Final Act of the 1954 Convention, since renunciation of protection arguably stems from an unwillingness to accept protection, not from an inability to obtain protection. 19