(2) Mechanisms of Statelessness What causes statelessness, especially de jure statelessness? UNHCR lists ten causes that engender statelessness: conflict of laws; transfer of territory; laws relating to marriage; administrative practices; discrimination; laws relating to registration of births; jus sanguinis; denationalization; renunciation; and automatic loss by operation of law.17 As has been discussed earlier, a person can become stateless at birth or later in life. In this paper, causes of statelessness will be examined at the time of a person’s birth and subsequent stages in life.18 Firstly, in considering statelessness at birth, it should be recalled that two commonly known principles, jus soli and jus sanguinis, dictate criteria for citizenship. The former grants citizenship based on place of birth, and the latter on family heritage or descent. The criteria by which states grant citizenship falls within their sovereign authority. However, these two different approaches sometimes work against the universal right to nationality, rendering a newborn stateless. An example of this is a child born in a country which adopts jus sanguinis to parents who are citizens of a country granting nationality based on jus soli. S/he is in danger of becoming stateless. When the parents are stateless, the new born child succeeds this statelessness. Some jus sanguinis countries only grant citizenship to children of fathers who are nationals, and exclude matrilineal citizenship. In this case, children born to a citizen mother and a non-citizen father can become stateless.19 Jus sanguinis nationality laws can engender statelessness in newly born children if they 17 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Information and Accession Package: The 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (rev. January 1999), para.10. 18 See A Study of Statelessness, supra note 4, Part Two. Section I, Chapter 1; Hudson, supra note 9, pp.17-19; Geske, M., “State Building, Citizenship and Statelessness (1997),” available at http://www2.soros.org/fmp2/html/build_intro.html; Nationality and Statelessness, supra note 12, pp.27-42; Conclusion on Identification, Prevention and Reduction of Statelessness and protection of Stateless Persons, 6 October 2006 Mo.106 (LVII)-206, para (j); Weissbrodt, D. & Collins C., “The Human Rights of Stateless Persons,” Human Rights Quarterly, Vol.28 (2006), pp.253-64. 19 Lee incisively criticizes the gendered dimension inherent in the commonly adopted procedure of passing on the father’s nationality by acknowledging paternity for children born out of wedlock. Lee, T., Statelessness, Human Rights and Gender: Irregular Migrant Workers from Burma in Thailand (2005), p.122. Despite the jus soli principle adopted in the U.S., when a U.S. citizen has a child by a non-citizen woman, he must acknowledge legal paternity for the child to acquire U.S. citizenship. In 2001, a five-to-four U.S. Supreme Court majority denied the father’s claim that he should have been able to transmit birthright citizenship to his child on the same terms that an American citizen woman can. His non-marital son, who faced deportation, had been born to a non-citizen mother, but the father’s failure to acknowledge legal paternity had left the child stateless (Tuan Ahn Nguyen vs. INS, 533 U.S. 53(2001). 11