to provide protection and assistance to Palestinian refugees, and the reasons for creating separate agencies with different mandates towards the Palestinian refugee population. It examines the key instruments, provisions and UN Resolutions underlying the legal framework—in particular, the Refugee Convention and its Article 1D, the ‘exclusion clauses’ found in the 1954 Convention on Stateless Persons and the UNHCR Statute, and UNGA Resolution 194. Chapter Three analyzes state practice in thirty countries in Europe, the Americas, Oceania and Africa to examine their treatment of Palestinian asylum claims. Chapter Four summarizes and assesses the consequences of the different state approaches to refugee claims by Palestinians, and compares their approaches to UNHCR and other expert interpretations of the relevant legal provisions. Chapter Five sets out BADIL’s concerns about inaccurate state interpretations of the provisions and inconsistent responses to the urgent protection needs of Palestinian refugees, and provides recommendations for bridging the ongoing protection gaps for Palestinian refugees. The key conclusions drawn in the Handbook from the review of these states’ practices are that still very few states have come close to the interpretation of Article 1D as set out in the El Kott decision and recommended by UNHCR. The Handbook concludes, however, that states have expanded the use of complementary protection to fill the legal gaps in protection left by their ambiguous legal status, and have extended more effective—though still incomplete and non-permanent-protection for Palestinian asylum-seekers and refugees. The Handbook calls for greater compliance with El Kott and more precise application of the guidelines set out by UNHCR in interpreting El Kott. The Handbook points out the weaknesses and inconsistencies in the ECJ and UNHCR’s interpretations of 1D in light of other expert research and opinion, and it recommends extending complementary protection and extraterritorial application of refugee status to address the complex nationality/stateless status of Palestinians that severely complicates their claims as asylum-seekers and refugees. Thirty non-Arab state parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention or 1967 Protocol are covered in the Handbook. Of these, caselaw was available for analysis in 21, while the African and Latin American countries’ jurisprudence was either not reported or not available to access to the Handbook contributors. The countries covered are: Europe: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The Americas: Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Canada and the United States Oceania: Australia and New Zealand Africa: Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. xviii Handbook on Protection of Palestinian Refugees