The Plight of the Rightless: Mapping and Understanding Statelessness in Tripoli-V1.3 “A Stateless is a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.”13 This convention required that stateless persons enjoy the same basic human rights as other citizens, in particular education for their children, healthcare, freedom of religion, nondiscrimination, right of association, access to courts, equal access to personal status laws, appropriation rights, gainful employment, housing, social security, freedom of movement, travel documents, and transfer of assets. It provided states with practical solutions to address those needs and secure them for stateless persons. A second UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness was adopted in 1961. It aimed to reduce and prevent statelessness around the world and, by doing so, initiated an international framework to guarantee the right of every person to a nationality by requiring states to establish safeguards to prevent statelessness in their respective nationality laws. Those safeguards include: ● ● ● ● Granting nationality to children born otherwise stateless on their territory including foundlings, through regulating conflicting nationality or personal status laws. Nationality shall be granted upon an application and as prescribed by a national law which can stipulate specific conditions (provisions of Article 1). Under these conditions, no application may be rejected. Mothers who hold the State’s nationality shall grant nationality to their children born in wedlock on the State’s territory, if children would otherwise be stateless. If the law of the contracting State entails the loss of nationality as a consequence of a change in personal status, loss shall be conditional upon acquisition of another nationality. Lebanon has not ratified any of these two conventions. Appendix B lists all international conventions related to statelessness since 1948 and summarises Lebanon’s stance and action towards them. Causes and Consequences There are myriads of root causes of statelessness around the world. Most of them can be categorised into the following groups:14 1. Conflicting or inadequate national legislation related to nationality: States grant nationality based on two principles. The first, jus sanguinis, attributes the nationality of the parents to their children, and the second, jus soli, attributes the nationality of the country of birth or the country of residence for long periods as defined by the relevant national law. In cases where the child is born in a jus sanguinis country, to stateless or unknown parents, the child becomes stateless too. Moreover, under some legislations, persons who have been absent from their country of origin for a long period might lose their nationality. They would thus become stateless in the case where they live in a strictly jus sanguinis country. 2. Penalty or discriminative deprivation of nationality: A nationality deprivation penalty can be applied by the state to persons who have committed an offence, a fraudulent act or evasion of military service. Other religious, racial or even political discrimination, especially 13 14 UN Convention relating to the status of stateless persons, Art. 1, (1954). UN, A study of Statelessness (1949), p.117-127. 17