individual has a close relationship with the country based on residence, taxation, employment, family ties, participation in public life and personal ties to the state, nationality would not be internationally effective.35 Looking at how laws are applied in various countries, the three factors of birth, descent and residence provide a presumption of a genuine and effective link. Nationality granted at birth based on jus soli or sanguinis or later through naturalization has been widely adopted to correspond with these three factors. As was the case of the Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws, the focus of attention in international law in the early 20th century concentrated on the legal technicalities of how to eliminate the conflict in nationality laws. Concern for improving the disadvantages the stateless suffer did not receive much attention. For this reason, the Convention has been criticized for lacking provisions dealing with arbitrary confiscation of nationality by States. However, this absence probably originates from the drafters’ focus on conflict of domestic nationality laws. The 20th century saw denationalization and eviction en masse in Europe. In the 1920s, two million people were politically exiled from Russia and denationalized. In the 1930s, many Jews in Germany, Hungary, and Italy lost their citizenship rights for racial reasons, and in the 1940s, Germans and Hungarians lost their nationalities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. At the end of the Second World War, an astonishing 30 million refugees and stateless persons had emerged.36 The United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution on statelessness at its second session in 1947. This resolution expressed the wish that “early consideration be given by the United Nations to the legal status of persons who do not enjoy the protection of any government, in particular pending the acquisition of 35 Nottebohm Case, supra note 3. See also Brownlie, I., Principles of Public International Law (4th ed., 1990), pp.560-1. 36 Marrus, M., The Uprooted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (1985), pp. 297-98. Initially no distinction was made between refugees and stateless persons. Both had been displaced from their country (country of nationality/place of residence) and lacked national protection. As international organizations provided support to “refugees,” stateless persons outside their country of habitual residence and without national protection qualified as refugees and received treatment as such. However, as reasons for flight (racial, political, or religious persecution) became more important as criteria in screening a refugee claim, statelessness was conceptually differentiated from a refugee. See Batchelor, supra note 16, pp.239-41. The problem of statelessness received very little attention outside Europe. The U.N. International Law Commission Report by Special Rapporteur Manley Hudson only briefly mentions “Arab refugees from Palestine” and “stateless persons in the Far East.” Hudson, supra note 9, p.17. 18