recognized this, for the first time, to constitute persecution.293 A year later, in Stserba v Holder, the Sixth Circuit applied Haile II and held denationalization motivated by ethnic considerations to constitute persecution. 294 Stserba and her husband were Estonian citizens, ethnically Russian. Their Estonian citizenship had previously been revoked following the collapse of the USSR, and they only regained it ‘by complete chance’. Their son, who was mildly disabled, became an Estonian citizen at birth. They alleged past persecution on account of Russian ethnicity and fear of future persecution. The Court held that although not every revocation of citizenship is persecution, ethnically motivated denationalization resulting in statelessness could constitute persecution.295 The Court will need to consider the practical consequences of denationalization, which may vary between genocide, expulsion, or the possibility to remain in the country and become naturalized but with some hurdles.296 Even regardless of the consequences, ‘a person who is made stateless due to his or her membership in a protected group may have demonstrated persecution, even without proving that he or she has suffered collateral damage from the act of denationalization’.297 Thus, as in this case, rules that limit citizenship to pre-1940 citizens and their descendants so as to exclude ethnic Russians who emigrated during the Soviet occupation, may demonstrate past persecution on account of ethnicity.298 Only a change of circumstances would rebut the presumption of future persecution. The case further reveals that Stserba’s invalidation of her Russian medical degree as a pediatrician also constituted persecution on account of her ethnicity, due to the ‘sweeping limitations’ on her job as a pediatrician to which she was subjected.299 However, cases based purely on economic deprivation (e.g., inability to work due to the fact of being a woman in Saudi Arabia with no legal status) have generally been rejected, unless it can be established that the denial of work would result in economic deprivation of sufficient severity.300 In sum, the case law above reveals that courts and tribunals in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Spain and Belgium generally consider the practical consequences of the act of deprivation (or denial) of nationality to be key in their assessment of whether the act in question amounts to persecution; these need to be serious enough or sufficiently severe to Haile v. Holder (Haile II), 384 F. Appendix 501 (7 th Cir. 2010). For an excellent article on US case law on statelessness and persecution, see Stewart E. Forbes, ‘”Imagine There’s No Country”: Statelessness as Persecution in Light of Haile II’, 61 Buffalo Law Review 2013, pp.699-730. 294 Stserba at al. v Holder, No.09-4312, United States Court of Appeal, 6 th Circuit, 20 May 2011. 295 Ibid, page 8. 296 Ibid, page 9. 297 Ibid, page 10. 298 Ibid, pages 11-12. 299 Ibid, page 13. 300 El Assadi v Holder, US Court of Appeal, 25 April 2011, p.4. This is also the view of the Australian courts, e.g., case no. 0908992 [2010] RRTA 389, 14 May 2010, at para.141 (a case involving a stateless person who unsuccessfully claimed refugee status based on his age and the fact that he would find it very difficult to find work if returned to one of his countries of former residence, Indonesia, China or Hong Kong). 293 51