as a national by any State under the operation of its law’. 8 This definition is part of customary international law;9 it is concerned with whether a person has a nationality, and not with the manner in which a person became stateless. Accordingly, under the 1954 Stateless Status Convention, ‘where a deprivation of nationality may be contrary to rules of international law, this illegality is not relevant in determining whether the person is a national … rather, it is the position under domestic law that is relevant’.10 Thus, Article 1(1) of the 1954 Convention is connected to the right to nationality itself; it is not concerned with whether this nationality is effective in the sense of whether the individual can exercise the rights attached to nationality.11 In contrast, a key question for persons fleeing persecution and claiming refugee status is that of state protection, which includes considerations of effective nationality and therefore of the ability to exercise human rights.12 Refugees under the 1951 Refugees Convention, or other relevant regional instruments and under UNHCR’s international protection mandate, may also be, and often are, stateless. When this happens, international law provides that they ‘should be protected according to the higher standard which in most circumstances will be international refugee law, not least due to the protection from refoulement in Article 33 of the 1951 Convention’.13 This research paper aims to do three things: a. Review existing jurisprudence and academic literature regarding claims to refugee status based on arbitrary deprivation of nationality (and to a lesser extent claims based on the denial of the right to nationality) in the context of Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees in order to reach a clear understanding of the scope and key elements of these claims. b. Analyze existing State practice on this question so as to identify divergence and good practice. c. Suggest an appropriate and consistent approach to this question. It should be pointed out that this paper is essentially interested in the overlap between statelessness and refugee status. Accordingly, it leaves outside the scope of enquiry persons arbitrarily denied nationality by one State who have another nationality or other nationalities to fall back onto and are not therefore stateless. Thus, this paper is primarily on Protection of Stateless Persons under the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, Geneva, 2014, and Interparliamentary Union and UNHCR, Nationality and Statelessness: A Handbook for Parliamentarians No 22, 2014. 8 Article 1(1), 1954 UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. 9 International Law Commission, Articles on Diplomatic Protection with commentaries, 2006, at pp.48-49 – available at: http://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/9_8_2006.pdf 10 UNHCR Expert Meeting Prato 2010, page 4, para.18. See also, UNHCR Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons, para.56. 11 UNHCR Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons, paras.53-54. 12 Carol A. Batchelor, ‘Stateless Persons: Some Gaps in International Protection’ (1995) 7 International Journal of Refugee Law 232-259, at 233-234. 13 UNHCR Expert Meeting Prato 2010, page 2, para.5, and UNHCR Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons, paras. 125-128. See also Article 5, 1954 Convention (‘Rights granted apart from this Convention’): ‘Nothing in this Convention shall be deemed to impair any rights and benefits granted by a Contracting State to stateless persons apart from this Convention’. 2