Part I. Introduction and Context Even though the 1936 and 1938 instruments still did not make a real distinction between refugees and stateless people in terms of the protection they could claim, the latter document contained “one of the first explicit references to stateless people in an international instrument”.366 With stateless refugees still existing today, the development of the international refugee regime after World War I remains a defining moment for the protection of stateless and refugees. The legal protection system that was created had its shortcomings, for instance because protection only applied to specific groups of refugees, but it was important because “refugees became defined as a special category of international migrant”.367 Also, the fact that institutions were created which could act on behalf of refugees on the international plane was innovative and would turn out to be relevant to the protection of the stateless later. One more legal instrument should be highlighted when considering responses to statelessness after World War I: the 1930 Hague Convention.368 The relevant content of this instrument was already discussed shortly in paragraph 1.5.1. In the context of the LoN, it had been found that it would be desirable and possible to attempt to come to international agreement on conflict of nationality laws, a conference to codify international rules on nationality matters was convened.369 “[L]egal experts at the League identified international codification as a more limited way of addressing the growing numbers of petitions they received from people who claimed to be stateless since the war. They identified the problem of statelessness within the domain of the confl ict of laws and avoided addressing it as a wider international or humanitarian crisis resulting from mass denationalization or exclusionary national legislation. Infringing on nationality law would directly threaten the delicate boundary the League had created between new forms of international authority and the sovereign right if states.”370 The 1930 Hague Convention and three protocols371 were the result of this conference. Of the three protocols, two concerned statelessness. One related to a specific case of statelessness among children and provided that when nationality was not acquired based on birth in the territory, a person born in its territory of a mother possessing the nationality of that state and of a father without nationality or of unknown nationality 366 367 368 369 370 371 68 Michelle Foster & Hélène Lambert, International Refugee Law and the Protection of Stateless Persons (Oxford University Press 2019) 23. Claudena M Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe. The Emergence of a Regime (Clarendon Press 1995)144–145. 1930 Hague Convention. United Nations, ‘Documents on the Development and Codification of International Law’, Supplement to (1947) 41(4) American Journal of International Law <http://legal.un.org/ilc/documentation/english/ ASIL_1947_study.pdf> accessed 19 September 2021. Mira L Siegelberg, Statelessness. A Modern History (Harvard University Press 2020) 131. Special Protocol concerning Statelessness, Protocol relating to a Certain Case of Statelessness, Protocol relating to Military Obligations in Certain Cases of Double Nationality. Intersentia