Key Reflectionns • Statelessness faced by minorities is the result of deliberately discriminatory state policies, legislation and practices. The response to such discrimination must be multi-pronged, from direct lobbying and advocacy at the Government level to awareness raising and activism at the community level. • Individuals, who were once considered citizens, are being labelled as migrants to exclude them from access to rights and this is an increasingly worrying trend. • Discrimination against minorities has been recognised as a main cause of statelessness yet in spite of this, it continues to be perpetuated in all situations related to statelessness, including where individuals face difficulty in accessing rights despite having finally obtained their nationality. • State accountability must be more effectively addressed and perpetrators from the top to the bottom must be held accountable for their actions. • We must prioritise the protection and safety of the Rohingya in all repatriation efforts. In addition to these Grand Challenges Sessions, other panels dedicated to other themes often heavily touched on discrimination as well. While there are a variety of circumstances that give rise to statelessness at birth or later in life, there is most often an element of discrimination and/ or arbitrariness at play, when individuals or entire groups become stateless. This affects the Bidoon in Kuwait, Palestinians and Roma in Europe, certain groups within India as well as people of Indian origin in neighbouring states, among others. Discrimination and arbitrariness can manifest itself in an obvious, aggressive and even persecutory manner, such as when large communities are deprived of their nationality based on ethnicity or religion. These ideas were explored in the session “The nationality and statelessness of nomadic people” where the theoretical and conceptual problems of nationality and statelessness were discussed through the framework of a comparative research project on nomadic peoples carried out by the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. In the session “The child as ‘other’: Challenging context for ensuring the child’s right to nationality”, the speakers considered that childhood statelessness is extremely complex, especially when their statelessness cannot 24 be resolved simply through law reform as they are labelled as ‘other’ and treated as such from birth. Discrimination can also be more subtle and latent, such as the failure of states to prioritise legal reform that would plug gaps in the law which could cause statelessness. The panel on “A fresh look at international and regional frameworks and standards” saw international and regional frameworks and standards being discussed. This included contributions on the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination by Timnah Baker and discrimination under the European Convention on Human Rights by Caia Vlieks. The Conference’s workshops on “Strategic litigation” and “Legal assistance as an approach to addressing statelessness caused by discrimination” looked at how discrimination against minorities, which causes statelessness, can be challenged and addressed through litigation and legal assistance; and the conference’s interactive art programme, the CANCELLED experiment, looked at identity that exists at the exclusion of others, discussing the politics of identities that are defined by cancellation in their session CANCELLED: Identity.