documents are issued during the procedure to persons who claim to be stateless. The rationale behind this policy, which has been criticized by the Dutch Ombudsman, is that the issuance of an aliens’ passport or identity document will remove the incentive to fully commit to acquiring a passport. If, however, the person in question is later officially deemed stateless but is not granted residence, he or she is still not granted an aliens’ passport or identity document. 95. With regard to the Dutch reservation to Article 8, it should be noted that this Article was drafted in the context of the aftermath of the Second World War and principally refers to the possibility to exclude persons, for instance, from Germany and Japan. In addition, as noted by Nehemiah Robinson in his commentary on the 1954 Convention: “Under its first sentence, Article 8 does not preclude the application of exceptional measures to stateless persons, it only prohibits (within the limitation of the second sentence) their application to a stateless person ‘solely on account of his having previously possessed the nationality …’. In other words, a state is free to apply to a stateless person exceptional measures if they are taken on grounds other than his former nationality. Thus Article 8, sentence one, would not hinder the application of exceptional measures on account of the economic or political activity or special unwanted contacts of a stateless person, if such activity or contacts are, in general, a reason for applying all or some of the exceptional measures.”139 96. Since 1954, developments in international human rights law have strengthened nondiscrimination principles. For instance, under Article 2(1) of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, by which the Netherlands is bound, each State Party undertakes “to respect and the ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as … national or social origin, property, birth or other status”. Bearing in mind Robinson’s commentary and subsequent developments in international human rights standards, UNHCR therefore recommends that the Netherlands withdraw this reservation to the 1954 Convention. 97. With regard to Article 26 of the 1954 Convention, Robinson’s Commentary reports that Dutch concerns regarding granting stateless persons lawfully on the territory the right to freedom of movement on the same basis as other aliens were raised during the negotiation of the Convention. Since then, however, the Netherlands has ratified various human rights instruments which include commitments on freedom of movement at the same time as giving scope for their limitation for reasons of ordre public, but not for discrimination on grounds of nationality or absence thereof. Among these rights is that under Article 12 of the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stating that “everyone lawfully in the territory of a State, shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his [or her] residence”.140 42 139 UNHCR, Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, Its History and Interpretation, A Commentary by Nehemiah Robinson, 1997, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/ docid/4785f03d2.html. 140  ee similarly Protocol No. 4 to the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, which the S Netherlands ratified on 23 June 1982. Articles 2(1) and 2(3) read: “Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence. … No restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are in accordance with law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, for the maintenance of ordre public, for the prevention of crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” Mapping statelessness