Key Reflections • To ensure better protection for stateless persons, the 1951 Refugee Convention must be better implemented, with a more contemporary understanding of human rights law. Nationality deprivation, denationalisation and deprivation of social and economic rights are all types of persecution which stateless persons may face. • Consular protection has been greatly overlooked but it can play an important role in addressing statelessness in migratory contexts. • The effect and impact of the gender discrimination within Syria’s Citizenship Law is exacerbated through the ongoing conflict and forced displacement of the Syrian crisis. Syrian women must have equal rights to confer their nationality on their children and spouses. • There is an urgent need to simplify over complicated bureaucratic requirements in civil registration procedures to reduce the risk of statelessness which they can cause for refugees and migrants. • The need for greater awareness and statelessness identification mechanisms to identify statelessness are essential to reduce the occurrences of statelessness. • The idea that citizenship acquisition is a solution to statelessness can be problematic as political and structural dimensions of statelessness (and therefore post-statelessness) need to be tackled if statelessness is going to be truly addressed. • In the context of gross human rights violations, what do we actually mean by citizenship? • The qualification ‘de facto’ statelessness does not provide for anything because international law does not provide any facilitation to those who are de facto stateless. We therefore either need to help people get their nationality recognised, or we need to re-think when someone can be recognised as ‘de jure’ stateless. 19