stay anywhere except on board the ship on which they serve and cannot go ashore in a port of call. In this regard, the position of vessels under customary international law must be considered. Public vessels (i.e., merchant vessels belonging to a state) and private vessels are in most respects considered as though they were floating parts of the state under whose flag they sail. But this fiction does not go so far as to consider crew members as having residence in the territory of the flag state. The situation thus created imposed on the state, in the view of the framers of the Refugee Convention, an obligation to consider sympathetically requests of refugees, crew members, for their establishment in, or their temporary admission to, the territory of the flag state. The same consideration obviously motivated the conference to incorporate the provision in this Convention. 3. “Sympathetic consideration” is more or less the same as “favourable consideration” (used, for instance in Article 7 (4) of the Convention). It means an obligation to deal with such requests: and not to refuse them without proper reason, although the provision is of a discretionary, not a mandatory nature. Article 12 Personal status 1. The personal status of a stateless person shall be governed by the law of the country of his domicile or, if he has no domicile of the country of his residence. 2. Rights previously acquired by a stateless person and dependent on personal status, more particularly rights attaching to marriage, shall be respected by a Contracting State subject to compliance, if this be necessary, with the formalities required by the law of that State provided that the right in question is one which would have been recognized by the law of that State had he not become stateless. 1. This article reproduces literally the wording of Article 12 of the Refugee Convention. Its 109 inclusion was not questioned and it was adopted unanimously. The interpretation of this article must be based on the intentions and interpretation put on the relevant article of the Refugee Convention. 2. This article deals with the “personal status” of stateless persons, i.e., their legal capacity (age of majority, the rights of persons under age, capacity to marry, capacity of married women, the instances when a person may lose his legal capacity), their family rights (marriage, divorce, recognition and adoption of children, the powers of parents over their children or of husband over his wife and their mutual rights to support), the matrimonial régime (the mutual rights of spouses to property, for instance), and succession and inheritance (who succeeds whom, what are the consequences of a will, who is considered to have survived in case of unknown date of death, etc.). This has been a problem, which, in the case of foreigners and particularly persons possessing no nationality, created difficulties in many instances. Two tendencies can be distinguished in the existing domestic law: (a) The “Anglo-Saxon” rule which subjects foreigners to the law of their domicile; (b) the law in other countries where the personal status of a foreigner is governed by his (present or former) national law. In the first group of countries, a person without a nationality will encounter little difficulty in establishing his personal status if he has a domicile there; in the other case, a person without nationality (particularly if he never possessed one) does not possess, in theory, any status whatsoever, unless the law contains special 110 provisions for stateless persons (as, for example in Germany, Italy, Switzerland). The Convention on Private International Law stipulates that the status of an alien is to be governed by the law of the country of which he is a national. 109 110 SR.6, pp. 2-3. For a survey of existing legislation relating to stateless persons, see the IRO document submitted to the Ad Hoc Committee (E/AC.32/L.5).