INTRODUCTION UNHCR has had a mandate for stateless persons ever since the Office was established in 1950. Originally, that mandate only extended to stateless persons who are refugees. As discussed in Part I below, refugees who do not have a nationality at all are “de jure stateless”, whereas refugees who do have a nationality are “de facto stateless”. However, whereas all refugees are stateless, many stateless persons are not refugees.1 UNHCR’s mandate began to be extended to stateless persons more generally in 1974. Further to the entry into force of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, UN General Assembly Resolution 3274 (XXIX) of 1974 designated the Office as the body to which, in accordance with Article 11 of the Convention, “a person claiming the benefit of the Convention may apply for the examination of his claim and for assistance in presenting it to the appropriate authority.”2 Broadly speaking, the 1961 Convention establishes a set of rules according to which a person is entitled to acquire the nationality of a Contracting State, or not to be deprived of or to lose the nationality of a Contracting State, if he or she would otherwise be stateless. The Convention itself does not define the term “stateless”. However, Resolution No. I of the Final Act of the Conference that drew up the Convention recommends that persons who are stateless de facto should as far as possible be treated as stateless de jure to enable them to acquire an effective nationality. This implies that de facto stateless persons are to be understood as persons lacking an effective nationality. As will be seen in section 3 below, it also implies that the 1961 Convention is legally binding with respect to de jure statelessness only. The definition of de jure statelessness is itself to be found in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, according to which a stateless person is “a person not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”.3 Apart from the role given to UNHCR under the 1961 Convention, the Office’s broader mandate for non-refugee stateless persons arguably originated only with Conclusion No. 50 of the Office’s Executive Committee (ExCom), paragraph (l) of which noted the close connection between the problems of refugees and of stateless persons and invited States actively to explore and promote measures favourable to stateless persons, including accession to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, as well as the adoption of legislation to protect the basic rights of stateless persons and to eliminate sources of statelessness. 1 2 3 See section 1 below. In 1976, the General Assembly confirmed its decision in the light of experience of one year’s implementation of the 1961 Convention and requested UNHCR “to continue to perform these functions”: see UN General Assembly resolution 31/36 of 1976 on “Question of the establishment, in accordance with the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, of a body to which persons claiming the benefit of the Convention may apply”. See the discussion of the 1954 Convention in section 2 below. Note also that the International Law Commission states in the commentary its draft Articles on Diplomatic Protection that the definition of a stateless person in the 1954 Convention “can no doubt be considered as having acquired a customary nature” (International Law Commission, “Report of the International Law Commission on the work of its fifty-eighth session”, A/65/10, 2006, p. 49). i