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STATELESSNESS AS RHETORIC
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departs from the statelessness regime's policy intent. Revisioning entails having a
calibrated protection-oriented vision or outlook to statelessness. At the same time,
it works within the bounds of the 1954 Statelessness Convention, importantly acknowledging that international law's approach should not be discarded, despite
the vision, because international law still does accord rights and aims to protect
people. Furthermore, such a mechanism already exists in treaty law, which States
embarked on after a tumultuous world war. Despite the prohibition of any reservations to the definition, the 1954 Statelessness Convention contains a revision
procedure in Article 41. 316 That procedure commences when a State party requests to 'revision' the treaty. 317 The General Assembly must then recommend
what steps, if any, should be taken. 318 As the treaty prescribes nothing more, the
General Assembly possesses discretion on how to best proceed.
In this regard, I submit that the General Assembly could initiate the proper
steps in changing the terms of the 1954 Statelessness Convention. Other steps may
include: amending a treaty on nationality or human rights; creating a more precise
definition of statelessness in future treaties; and even initiating or advocating for
a change in the practice of States and other treaty bodies dealing with the concept
of statelessness. Those initiatory steps could be started at the level of the UN General Assembly or at the level of any of the organs and specialized bodies of the
UN or through any treaty body.
The point is that changing the definition of statelessness is possible. While I
admit that we are in a precarious moment in which the international community
is besieged with strong sentiments that would likely resist international lawmaking efforts that seek to address the status of persons on the move across borders
of States, implicating reasons that prove the elusiveness of high-level reform, 319
some factors below point to why the statelessness question could be an exception
to this broader trend. These factors relate to the recent, but inadequate, attempts
to change the statelessness definition and could draw in a more progressive consensus through a lawmaking process. I point to why some steps can be taken to at
least begin or move towards revisioning statelessness.
In this section, I first revisit those existing attempts to change the definition
of statelessness, arguing their inadequacy and showing that they reveal a growing
consensus on the impetus and need to 'revision' the statelessness definition. States
can build on these movements in the future. At the initiation of a party to the 1954
Statelessness Convention, as stated, the UN General Assembly could jumpstart
the revisioning process as the 1954 Statelessness Convention itself allows. Some
316. 1954 Statelessness Convention, supra note 16, at arts. 38, 41. A state may initiate this
through a request for the revision of the treaty through a notification addressed to the UN SecretaryGeneral.
317. Id. at art. 41(1). The Secretary-General then informs all UN members and nonmembers
(those invited to the conference that led to the treaty and those invited to sign or accede to the treaty).
In practice, this notification should be to all States. Id., at art. 42(f).
318. Id. at art. 41(2).
319. Thanks to David Michael Hughes for this point.