A Teleological and Child-Sensitive Interpretation of refugee status determination.122 To extrapolate from this comparison, where the ‘country of nationality’ is simply supplanted with ‘a country of former habitual residence’, there is no similar mechanism for stateless children born abroad who are outside the country of nationality or former habitual residence of their parent(s) as designated for the refugee status determination inquiry. The notion has been clearly ‘tailored to fit’ an adult-sized pattern of habituality and experience of time, reflecting their personal history and connection with the country they resided in prior to their predicament of alienage, hence the qualifier ‘former’ in the notion of a country of former habitual residence. Plainly, a stateless adult will inevitably have resided ‘somewhere’ outside the country of refugee and will have ‘a foothold’ or ‘default’ country of reference for the inquiry. Absent any child-friendly definition of a country of former habitual residence reflecting their centre of interests (encompassing a different time vector and more nuanced and shared parent–child ties to territory), a stateless child without a country of former habitual residence has no country of reference for the inquiry. Such children do not have the same benefit of time as adults to establish ‘former’ or even ‘durable’ connections to the designated reference country. It is necessary to distinguish further that a child born in the country of refuge or in territory other than the designated country of former habitual residence, who is conferred a nationality, has a country of reference for the inquiry. The Refugee Convention’s humanitarian rationale (to afford protection from serious harm arising from the discriminatory denial of fundamental human rights) would strongly call for a parallel treatment and access to the Refugee Convention for children born into a nationality and those who are not, where otherwise the credentials to refugeehood are met. This article proposes that the refugee definition is capable of responding in equitable terms to the claims of children denied a nationality whilst born outside the country of nationality or former habitual residence of their parent(s). To find otherwise would be ‘intuitively wrong’. 123 As will be explored later in this article, this is possible through the recognition of core indicia that inform a child-sensitive understanding of a country of habitual residence, a notion that is the embodiment of a child’s centre of interests at the time of refugee status determination. It should be noted that the intersection point between the discriminatory denial of a nationality (that would otherwise be inherited through parentage) and a country of reference signals a protection-sensitive factor that informs the child’s centre of interests (ie, habitual residence). This factor lay dormant up until the 122 Eric Fripp argues that the country that has denationalised the applicant should remain the country of nationality for the refugee inquiry as to do otherwise ‘adds a potential denial of international protection to the arbitrary removal of that individual’s nationality and intuitively seems wrong’: Eric Fripp, Nationality and Statelessness in the International Law of Refugee Status (Hart Publishing 2016) 211. However, as conveyed by Foster and Lambert, such an interpretation is difficult to reconcile with the plain text of the refugee definition and its drafting history and is a ‘strained and complicated’ avenue to accommodate the protection needs for those denationalised by country of origin. These academics point out that the Refugee Convention provides a more ‘straight forward and less complicated method of achieving outcome’, where the reference state becomes the country of former habitual residence: Foster and Lambert (n 17) 123. See also Eric Fripp ‘Deprivation of Nationality, “the Country of His Nationality” in Article 1A(2) of the Refugee Convention, and Non-Recognition in International Law’ (2016) 28 International Journal of Refugee Law 453, 475; AL (Myanmar) (n 79) 27–37 [105]–[137]. 123 To adopt the language of Fripp (n 122) in the context of stateless persons arbitrarily denied a nationality and a country of nationality within the meaning of art 1A(2). See also Foster and Lambert (n 17) 125. 29