74 Brad K. Blitz not surprising, given the expressly European context informing the design of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, that millions of stateless people saw their protection needs subsumed under the refugee regime. Although a new instrument was introduced specifically for stateless people, namely, the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, few states were party to it. Moreover, the Convention itself established a narrow definition of statelessness. Under Article 1, it defined a “stateless person” as a person “who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.”10 This definition is used to describe those who are de jure stateless, in contrast to the vast majority of those who are de facto stateless or effectively stateless, that is, individuals who cannot obtain proof of their nationality, residency, or other means of qualifying for citizenship and are thus practically excluded from protection by the state.11 The 1954 Statelessness Convention was initially conceived as a protocol to be included as an addendum to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Both were developed from the premise that refugeehood and statelessness were temporary statuses and that states would eventually integrate the millions of people who fell within these categories. A second Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness was introduced in 1961 with provisions to disallow statelessness at birth and to avoid statelessness resulting from the loss, deprivation, or renunciation of nationality in later life, as well as statelessness resulting from state succession. Yet, this instrument also presented several limitations: most importantly, it defers to states and asserts that nationality shall be granted by “operation of law to a person born in the State’s territory,” where such persons would “otherwise be stateless.”12 One important failing of this convention is that it does not prohibit the possibility of revocation of nationality, nor does it retroactively grant citizenship to all currently stateless persons; hence, it only offers a partial remedy to the problem of statelessness. Further geopolitical divisions during the Cold War, which largely prevented refugees from leaving the Soviet bloc, undermined any moves to establish an effective regime for stateless persons during that period. In the meantime, Palestinians, who were arguably among the most visible stateless groups, were also treated separately. Even though the 1961 Statelessness Convention provided for an international body that would serve to examine and assist individual claims,13 the UN system was hampered by geopolitical and organizational tensions. In 1974, when the 1961 Statelessness Convention came into effect, UNHCR did not have the capacity to fulfill this role. Not only was the agency distracted by the surge in 10 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, September 28, 1954, 360 U.N.T.S. 117. 11 The final act of the Convention includes a nonbinding recommendation that states should “consider sympathetically” the possibility of according de facto stateless persons the treatment that the Convention offers to de jure stateless people. For a historical overview, see C. A. Batchelor, “Stateless Persons: Some Gaps in International Protection” (1995) 7 International Journal of Refugee Law 232–259. 12 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, August 28, 1961, 989 U.N.T.S. 175. 13 Ibid. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press