When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason, without the position of such persons being definitively settled in accordance with the relevant resolutions adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, these persons shall ipso facto be entitled to the benefits of this Convention.” The drafters of the 1951 Refugee Convention expected that the mass displacement of Palestinians would be resolved relatively quickly after the 1951 Convention was drafted. They included Article 1D to address, in part, the United Nations’ acknowledged responsibilities to Palestinian refugees and in light of the UN agencies set up to assist and protect them. As Professor Guy Goodwin-Gill has observed: “The travaux préparatoires (“preparatory works”) of paragraph 7(c) of the UNHCR Statute and Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention confirm the intention of participating states not to exclude Palestine refugees. What was important to all participants was continuity of protection, and the non-applicability of the 1951 Convention [to some Palestinian refugees] was intended to be temporary and contingent.”32 UNHCR Guidelines also confirm that a broad protective interpretation of Article 1D is required: “In interpreting Article 1D, it is appropriate to have regard to its object and purpose and its context, including through recourse to the travaux préparatoires of the 1951 Convention and to other contemporaneous international instruments intended to address the questions of protection and institutional responsibility for Palestinian refugees. … The first purpose is to ensure that Palestinian refugees continue to be recognized as a specific class, and that they continue to receive protection and associated rights, until their position has been definitively settled in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly.”33 The fact that displaced Palestinians were refugees was widely acknowledged by UN delegates at the time the 1951 Refugee Convention was drafted. This is why Article 1D contains an automatic (‘ipso facto’) inclusion clause.34 In light of the drafting history and given the purpose this provision was intended to fulfil, BADIL has taken the position that the cessation of “protection or assistance” under Article 1D should be interpreted to mean that the cessation of either protection or assistance to Palestinian refugees should trigger the inclusion clause of Article 1D on a general scale.35 As such, the inability of the UNCCP to fulfil its protection mandate triggered Article 1D’s inclusion clause, and the exclusion clause should not apply to any Palestinian refugees eligible for inclusion, since neither UNRWA nor UNHCR provides legal protection to Palestinian refugees in UNRWA’s area of operation. However, neither CJEU jurisprudence nor UNHCR guidance adopts this approach. Additionally, government decision-makers and judges around the world have frequently overlooked the pre-existing status of Palestinians as refugees and have misapplied Article 1D, all too often leaving Palestinians unable to access the protection to which they are entitled as refugees. 32 Goodwin-Gill, ‘Preface,’ in BADIL, Closing Protection Gaps, n 11, ix. 33 UNHCR, Guidelines on International Protection No. 13: Applicability of Article 1D of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees to Palestinian Refugees, n 6, Paras 6-7. 34 Goodwin-Gill, Preface, in BADIL, Closing Protection Gaps, n 11; and see Susan Akram, ‘Palestinian Refugees and their Legal Status: Rights, Politics, and Implications for a Just Solution’, Journal of Palestine Studies XXXI, no. 3 (Spring 2002), 36-51, 40. 35 BADIL, Closing Protection Gaps, n 11, Introduction and Ch 5, S 2.2. See also Akram, ‘UNRWA and Palestine Refugees’ (2021) n 7; and Katia Bianchini, Protecting Stateless Persons: The Implementation of the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons across EU States (Brill Nijhoff, 2018), 90-92. 7