to prevent and to produce legal remedies to such abuses. Solutions may be found through more efficient national procedures within the countries in question. However, this paper argues that for stateless refugees, legal remedies should be found in international refugee law, namely, the 1951 Refugee Convention.315 Most stateless persons face discrimination and vulnerability, and what we need is a generous definition of persecution. Justice McHugh in applicant A & Anor v MIEA & Anor observed that: 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 particular social group.316 No court is willing to recognize statelessness per se as persecution. This is because the cause of statelessness (i.e., discrimination and/or deprivation of nationality) may well violate human rights law but not all human rights violations are persecutory acts, and the 1954 Stateless Status Convention should be applied. Thus, courts tend to focus on the effects or consequences of statelessness on the person (e.g., the denial of human rights through discriminatory acts) as these are easier to measure in terms of severity. This paper argues that short of engineering one’s deprivation of nationality for personal convenience, all deprivation of nationality should lead to finding of persecution because ‘nationality’ is and continues to be the gateway for the exercise of most basic human rights. Where deprivation of nationality is found to be discriminatory and/or arbitrary, this should lead to finding of persecution for a Convention ground. The task is a simple one, even in the field of economic, social and cultural rights, because as argued by Roth, the ‘nature of the violation, violator and remedy is clearest when it is possible to identify arbitrary or discriminatory governmental conduct that causes or substantially contributes to an ESC rights violation’, as opposed to a problem of distributive justice.317 Such an approach would further be consistent with growing consensus that asylum seekers and refugees are a special category of persons, as vulnerable people.318 Their vulnerability In cases where a person qualifies both as a refugee under the 1951 Refugee Convention and as a stateless person in accordance with the 1954 Statelessness Convention, the State must apply to the person the more favourable provisions in the Refugee Convention, as provided in the Preamble to the 1954 Convention, third recital. 316 Applicant A v Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (1997) 190 CLR 225. 317 Kenneth Roth, ‘Defending Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Practical Issues Faced by an International Human Rights Organization’, Human Rights Quarterly 26 (2004), pp.63-73, at 69. 318 E.g., High Court of Kenya, Kituo Cha Sheria and Others v Attorney General, 26 July 2013, paras.34 and 40, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/51f622294.html [accessed 11 March 2014]; and MSS v Belgium and Greece, European Court of Human Rights, judgment of 21 January 2011. See also, Alexandra Timmer and Lourdes Peroni, ‘Vulnerable Groups: The Promise of an Emerging Concept in European Human Rights 315 56