State to take all necessary steps to secure admission and entry into the country of habitual residence, prior to removal.185 The second legal issue concerns the denial or deprivation of nationality and the unwillingness to return to the country of former habitual residence. This scenario covers situations where stateless persons are unwilling to return to their country of habitual residence because of a well-founded fear of persecution in that country, independently from considerations of re-entry and ability to return. As held by Stanley-Burton LJ, ‘Deprivation of nationality may lead to inability to return to one’s country of nationality, but they are not identical’. 186 Courts’ jurisprudence on this second legal issue is far from consistent. Underlying all of these issues lies the consideration of whether discrimination is the same as persecution, and if not, where does the difference lie in cases involving statelessness. Combatting discrimination is a fundamental purpose of the 1951 Refugee Convention, as expressed in the Preamble; ‘discrimination is an aspect of persecution’. 187 Thus, antidiscrimination norms supply an important baseline in determining a claim for refugee status. It has been noted that the word discrimination has a different meaning depending on the legal context. 188 In international refugee law, where the term persecution still lacks a common definition (except in the European Union), 189 discrimination is often used to support the individualized or targeted character of persecutory acts, in contrast with the indiscriminate character of generalized violence.190In this context also, discrimination is often used to indicate a form of harm that is less serious in terms of its intensity or gravity than Interparliamentary Union and UNHCR, Nationality and Statelessness: A Handbook for Parliamentarians No 22, 2014, p.27. See, e.g., Amie and Others v Bulgaria, Application no. 58149/08, European Court of Human Rights, judgment of 12 February 2013, 4th Section. 186 MA (Ethiopia) v SSHD [2009] EWCA Civ 289, para.73. 187 Revenko, [2001] QB p.606-A-B (Steven Kovats for the Secretary of State). See also, Justice McHugh in Applicant A & Anor v MIEA A Anor: ‘Persecution for a Convention reason may take an infinite variety of forms from death or torture to the deprivation of opportunities to compete on equal terms with other members of the relevant society. Whether or not conduct constitutes persecution in the Convention sense does not depend on the nature of the conduct. It depends on whether it discriminates against a person because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a social group’, A v Minister for Immigration & Ethnic Affairs [1997] HCA 4; (1997) 190 CLR 225; (1997) 142 ALR 331 (24 February 1997). 188 Rebecca Dowd, ‘Dissecting Discrimination in Refugee Law’, 23 International Journal of Refugee Law 2011, pp.2853. 189 A consensus exists that ‘human rights are the correct point of departure’, however, jurisprudential and scholarly divergence remains regarding which human rights to consider, including issues of intensity of the acts, their duration and their cumulative effect, see Andreas Zimmermann and Claudia Mahler, ‘Article 1 A, para.2’, in A Zimmermmann (ed) The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and Its 1967 Protocol – A Commentary, OUP 2011, pp.282-465, at paras.216-233. See also, Jane McAdam, ‘Rethinking the Origins of ‘Persecution’ in Refugee Law’ (2014) 25 International Journal of Refugee Law 667-692. In the context of the EU, a legal definition of persecution now exists in Article 9 of the EU Qualification Directive; see Storey, ‘Persecution: Towards a Working Definition’. 190 Hélène Lambert, ‘The Next Frontier: Expanding Protection in Europe for Victims of Armed Conflict and Indiscriminate Violence’ (2013) 15 International Journal of Refugee Law 207-234. 185 34