Part I. Introduction and Context Identity to Armenian Refugees.348 This Plan and the aforementioned Arrangement were complemented and clarified by the 1926 Arrangement relating to the Issue of Identity Certificates to Russian and Armenian Refugees, Supplementing and Amending the previous Arrangements dated July 5, 1922, and May 31, 1924349 and the 1928 Arrangement Relating to the Legal Status of Russian and Armenian Refugees.350 Furthermore, an additional Arrangement in 1928 extended the protection measures for the Russian and Armenian refugees also to “Turkish, Assyrian, Assyro-Chaldaean and other assimilated refugees”.351 These instruments were not legally binding but basically contained ‘rules of conduct’ for states.352 Whereas these ‘soft law’ measures – after all, they were not legally binding – were a significant step in improving the situation of certain stateless refugees, other groups were left out, even when they repeatedly asked the High Commissioner to extend the measures to them too.353 For instance, people from the Central European successor states “petitioned the Office of the High Commission for Refugees to include former imperial subjects without national citizenship”.354 It should also be noted that for these instruments, indeed, it was about lack of protection and not about what caused this (i.e. statelessness or being a refugee similar to the standards we know today), so no real distinction was made between stateless people and refugees.355 At the same time though, legal theorists like Marc Vishniak and Alexandre Gorovtsev were already beginning to see how stateless people could be viewed as a separate group in international law.356 Against the background of economic decline in the late 1920s and in the 1930s, attitudes toward refugees – and foreigners in general – changed and states became (again) more protective of who they considered their ‘own’. This resulted, for instance, in more restrictive rules on the employment of aliens. With the conditions for refugees worsening in Europe, efforts to enact a comprehensive treaty on refugees were made, because “with the exception of the Nansen passport, the existing so-called arrangements are producing practically no effect upon the position of the refugees”.357 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 66 Plan for the Issue of a Certificate of Identity to Armenian Refugees (signed 31 May 1924) 7–10 LoN Official Journal 969. Arrangement relating to the Issue of Identity Certificates to Russian and Armenian Refugees, Supplementing and Amending the previous Arrangements dated July 5, 1922, and May 31, 1924 (signed 12 May 1926) 89 LNTS 48 (No. 2004). Arrangement Relating to the Legal Status of Russian and Armenian Refugees (signed 30 June 1928) 89 LNTS 55 (No. 2005). Arrangement Concerning the Extension to Other Categories of Certain Measures Taken in Favour of Russian and Armenian Refugees (signed 30 June 1929) 89 LNTS 65 (No. 2006), which also provides defi nitions of these groups of refugees. Claudena M Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe. The Emergence of a Regime (Clarendon Press 1995) 104–105. Marc Vishniak, ‘The Legal Status of Stateless Persons’ in AG Duker (ed), Pamphlet Series: Jews and the Post-War World (No. 6, American Jewish Committee 1945) 44. Mira L Siegelberg, Statelessness. A Modern History (Harvard University Press 2020) 107. Cf Michelle Foster & Hélène Lambert, International Refugee Law and the Protection of Stateless Persons (Oxford University Press 2019) 21. Mira L Siegelberg, Statelessness. A Modern History (Harvard University Press 2020) 105–107. Secretariat memorandum of 3 February 21933, LNA R5614/686, as quoted in Claudena M Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe. The Emergence of a Regime (Clarendon Press 1995) 124 (n 70). Intersentia