Chapter 2. Europe and Statelessness The specific situation of formerly German Jews who had been deprived of their nationality was an issue of separate concern after the war. Even if the Nazi nationality laws were revoked in 1945 by the Allied Control Council with Control Council Law No. 1, the nationality question remained a complicated one – not least because many people deprived of their nationality did not want their German nationality back.393 The German Basic Law eventually made it possible for everyone, including their descendants, who had been deprived of their German nationality between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 on political, racial or religious grounds to restore their nationality upon application. And if they had taken up residence in Germany after 8 May 1945 and have not indicated anything to the contrary, they were considered to have never have been deprived of this nationality.394 The aftermath of World War II also saw the ‘genesis’ of human rights as we know them today with at its core two developments: responding to the post-war refugee question and the adoption of the (non-legally binding and therefore not so controversial) UDHR, which paved the way for the adoption of legally binding human rights treaties.395 With regard to the latter, the UN set a common human rights standard for states to aspire to with the 1948 UDHR. For the stateless, whose rights had so often been violated, this document was certainly relevant. Even if the UDHR was not legally binding, it included the right that is most directly violated by statelessness itself: the right to a nationality. The impact that this right has had on the issue of statelessness and how it developed is part of the discussions in paragraph 1.5 on the international framework for preventing and solving statelessness. Legally binding treaties were not adopted until later: the ICCPR and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)396 were, for instance, adopted in 1966. As we saw in paragraph 1.5, the UN human rights system has had a significant impact on preventing and solving statelessness. At the same time, further cooperation of states on different matters on the international plane was needed to rebuild the world, and Europe in particular, after the devastation of World War II. The pressing issue the international community had to deal with were refugees and the stateless. In the context of the UN, this was responded to by creating the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) in 1947, which also 393 394 395 396 David Fraser & Frank Caestecker, ‘Jews or Germans? Nationality Legislation and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy in Western Europe after the Holocaust’ (2013) 31 Law and History Review 391, 400ff. Art 116(2) German Basic Law (Constitution) – Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany in the revised version published in the Federal Law Gazette Part III, Classification No. 100–1, as last amended by Article 1 of the Act of 28 March 2019 (Federal Law Gazette I, 404). Eg G Daniel Cohen, ‘The “Human Rights Revolution” at Work. Displaced Persons in Postwar Europe’ in Stefan-Ludwig Hoff mann (ed), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press 2011) 45–61. See more generally also Peter N Stearms, Human Rights in World History (Routledge 2012). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 3 January 1976) 993 UNTS 3 (ICESCR). Intersentia 73