38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX 1/16/2021 12:59 PM Statelessness as Rhetoric: The Case for Revisioning Statelessness in Our Statist World Francis Tom Temprosa* This article argues that the definition of statelessness in international law should be changed. When the international statelessness regime was instituted, the ultimate goal was the full protection of unprotected persons who are not refugees. Yet, in our statist world, the definition of statelessness—as embodied in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons—has become rhetoric. Contrary to the claim that the definition is merely declaratory of a status, this article contends that the definition lends itself to having features and facets of a discretionary design of rhetoric. It does more than accord States with discretion. It also allows them to constitute and ordain who is stateless and therefore entitled to the benefits of the statelessness regime in international law—which ensures protection and rights. Principally combining insights from critical rhetoric as theory, this article also posits that ideologies animate and persist in the determinations of statelessness: 'formalism' and 'discretionism'. The definition, instead of https://doi.org/10.15779/Z384F1MK01 * S.J.D. Candidate (Doctor of Juridical Science), Michigan Grotius Fellow, University of Michigan Law School; LL.M., Clyde Alton DeWitt Fellow, 2017, University of Michigan Law School; J.D. (Second Honors), 2010, Ateneo de Manila University School of Law; B.A. (cum laude), 2006, University of the Philippines. The author is a faculty member of the Ateneo de Manila University School of Law and a lecturer at the Far Eastern University Institute of Law. He is the director of the Human Rights Education and Promotion Office of the Commission on Human Rights. He is grateful for the comments and suggestions of David M. Hughes and the encouragement and support of Professor Steven R. Ratner and James A. Goldston. An earlier version of this piece also benefited from the very helpful and thoughtful comments of Professor James C. Hathaway. Thank you. Many of the ideas here were inspired by the author's wonderful years of working as focal point for stateless concerns of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in its Philippine office, a time when the Philippines became the first country in Southeast Asia to be a party to the 1954 Stateless Convention and the first to establish a statelessness determination procedure in the region. He later on became counsel of the Commission on Human Rights before the Philippine Supreme Court in a case involving foundlings and statelessness. He is eternally grateful to the editors and entire staff of the Berkeley Journal of International Law for their hard work, patience, and comments on the piece. Without them, this piece would not have been possible. All errors are his alone. 240