imposes specific obligations on States,319 in addition to their obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights, such as, for instance, the duty to address refugees’ basic needs or the duty not to obstruct humanitarian organisations from providing assistance to refugees in need. Based on an analysis of international courts’ decisions, this paper identifies the following good practice: - The right to nationality is a fundamental human right; it must be protected equally for everyone (including children) and nationality rules must therefore not be discriminatory nor applied in a discriminatory manner; - The right to nationality allows the individual to acquire and exercise rights and obligations inherent in membership in a political community; - The right to nationality provides the individual with a minimum measure of legal protection; - Full remedies must be provided by the States’ authorities responsible for violating this right; - A deporting State must do everything it can to ensure the re-entry of a stateless person (through the issuance and delivery of a travel document to the person) in the former country of residence or country of birth; should removal not be possible in practice, the deporting State should lawfully admit the stateless person into its territory, and facilitate naturalization; - Asylum seekers are a particularly underprivileged and vulnerable population group in need of special protection; - A definition of acts of persecution that includes ‘arbitrary deprivation of nationality’. Based on an analysis of domestic courts’ jurisprudence, this paper has identified the following best practice: - ‘Former habitual residence’ refers to the length and character of the time a refugee spent in a country, independently of whether residence was lawful; - In the case of more than one country of former habitual residence, the last country of habitual residence alone should be relevant, especially if the applicant spent a considerable number of years in that last country; the benefit of the doubt principle should then be applied with regard to all other countries; - Denial or deprivation of nationality amounts to persecution if the consequences are sufficiently serious, including significant economic hardship threatening the capacity to subsist (such as denial of the right to work and the right to an adequate standard of living coupled in the context of an already precarious existence); - Denial or deprivation of nationality for a discriminatory reason constitutes persecution; Convention Law’, 11 International Journal of Constitutional Law 2013, 1056-1085. 319 These may be provided by constitutional provisions (e.g., Article 21(3) of the Constitution of Kenya – ‘All State organs and all public officers have the duty to address the needs of vulnerable groups within society, including women, older members of society, persons with disabilities, children, youth, members of minority or marginalized communities, and members of particular ethnic, religious or cultural communities’) or human rights treaties (e.g., Article 3 or 5 of the ECHR or Article 4 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights). 57