Clara Van Thillo two conventions remained relatively low for a few decades and statelessness received little attention again until the end of the Cold War. The breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia demonstrated how individuals could be rendered stateless in the context of State succession, and made the issue more pressing.7 Moreover, the emergence of international human rights law throughout the second half of the 20th century laid more emphasis on the individual and his rights, and enshrined the right to a nationality more firmly. Human rights scholars and practitioners increasingly uncovered the underlying human rights issues related to statelessness, and considered human rights law as the appropriate tool to tackle it. Furthermore, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), mandated to address statelessness, launched its #IBelong campaign in 2014 to eradicate statelessness entirely by 2024.8 As a consequence, statelessness has received much more attention in the last ten years from the bodies and agencies of the United Nations (UN), regional organisations, civil society and academics, who have taken a human rights-based approach to statelessness. Against this backdrop, this paper analyses how statelessness was understood and addressed under traditional international law in the early 20th century and in the years leading up to the adoption of the Statelessness Conventions. This early approach is contrasted with the current human rights-based approach. The paper examines how the international community came to understand the root causes of statelessness overlooked by traditional writers, and how it came to acknowledge that statelessness does not only lead to severe human rights consequences, but also has a distinct human rights dimension at its creation. The paper then goes on to assess these two approaches, and comes to conclusion that while the human rights-based approach is the only appropriate approach to address statelessness and must be considered as the most ‘fair’, still important challenges remain. By continuing to build on the work of traditional international lawyers, the human rights-based approach runs into its limits. 2. Understanding and addressing statelessness A. The traditional international law approach At the beginning of 20th century, statelessness was already considered as an undesirable, possible consequence of the sovereign power of States to decide on the acquisition and loss of nationality. As early as 1896, the Institut de Droit International formulated “nul ne doit être sans nationalité” (“no one should be without a nationality”).9 After World War I, statelessness was gradually recognised as an issue of international law.10 In 1930, the League of Nations organised a conference in the Hague, with among others the aim to address statelessness.11 The preamble of the Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality UNHCR ‘Evaluation of UNHCR’s role and activities in relation to statelessness’ (July 2001) UN Doc EPAU/2001/09, para. 29. 8 <https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/>. 9 Institut de Droit International ‘Principes relatifs aux conflits de lois en matière de nationalité (naturalisation et expatriation)’ (1895) <https://www.idiiil.org/app/uploads/2017/06/1895_camb_02_fr.pdf>. 10 Mira L Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press 2020), 83-85. 11 Hunter Miller, ‘The Hague Codification Conference’ (1930) 24 The American Journal of International Law 674, 674. 7 2 Academy of European Law