Clara Van Thillo deprivation. Interestingly, Article 9 prohibits nationality deprivation on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds, thereby resonating the concerns voiced by the ILC. In spite of these efforts to address statelessness at a global level, the Statelessness Conventions did not achieve their aim of preventing and reducing statelessness and effectively protecting stateless persons, and have been widely criticised.70 Ratifications of these instruments remained dramatically low for a long time, and the issue of statelessness was pushed to the back of the international agenda, overshadowed by concerns for refugees.71 B. The human rights-based approach The emergence of human rights law has fundamentally changed the understanding of statelessness, and the approaches to it. While traditional international lawyers labelled stateless persons as ‘outlaws’,72 whose link with the law of nations was severed due to a lack of nationality, human rights law re-introduced that link. It pushed for the idea that individuals are granted human rights protection because they are human beings, not nationals of a particular State.73 The UN Human Rights Committee (CCPR) stated that the rights contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)74 “apply to everyone, irrespective of reciprocity, and irrespective of his or her nationality or statelessness.”75 Such a proposition can be contrasted with Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase regarding the right to a nationality, which she described as “the right to have rights”.76 It was Arendt’s view that only by being member of a State, by having a nationality, one could truly possess human rights.77 International human rights law proclaims that this point of view no longer holds. Nevertheless, reality often indicates otherwise, as States remain responsible for the domestic implementation of human rights standards and often distinguish between citizens and non-citizens.78 Human rights law has also proclaimed the right to a nationality as a fundamental right to which all human beings are entitled. The right to a nationality was laid down for the first time in the UDHR, and was later incorporated in multiple international and regional human rights treaties. See e.g. ibid; Carol A Batchelor, ‘Stateless Persons: Some Gaps in International Protection’ (1995) 7 International Journal of Refugee Law 232; Katia Bianchini, Protecting Stateless Persons: The Implementation of the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons across EU States (Brill Nijhoff 2018), Chapter 3 (74-113); Tendayi Bloom, ‘Problematizing the Conventions on Statelessness’ (2013) 02/01 United Nations University - Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility. 71 By June 1997, only 44 States were party to the 1954 Convention and 19 States to the 1961 Convention. UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees 1997-1998: A Humanitarian Agenda (Oxford University Press 1997), 257. 72 This wording was, among others, used by Weis. Weis, ‘Statelessness as a legal political problem’ (n 13), 13. 73 For example, Donnelly states that “human rights are literally the rights that one has simply because one is a human being.” Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press 2013), 10. 74 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (adopted 19 December 1966, entered into force 23 March 1976) 999 UNTS 171 (ICCPR). 75 Human Rights Committee (CCPR) ‘General Comment No. 15: The Position of Aliens Under the Covenant’ (11 April 1986) UN Doc HRI/GEN/1/Rev.1, para. 1. 76 Richard J Bernstein, ‘Hannah Arendt on the Stateless’ (2005) 11 Parallax 46. 77 ibid. 78 ECOSOC ‘The rights of non-citizens: Final report of the Special Rapporteur, Mr. David Weissbrodt, submitted in accordance with Sub-Commission decision 2000/103, Commission resolution 2000/104 and Economic and Social Council decision 2000/283’ (26 May 2003) UN Doc E/CN.4/Sub.2/2003/23, 10-12. 70 8 Academy of European Law