broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationship – except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human [...] If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually, the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow man. This exercise is designed to encourage students to think about the relationship between nationality and rights under contemporary human rights law. Distribute copies of the text of a number of major human rights instruments or bill of rights from Constitutions and ask the students to read through them carefully and highlight any articles/provisions that they feel have some influence on the question of the relationship between nationality and rights. For instance, give each student two human rights instruments to assess, or one of the following sets: 1. Universal Declaration of Human Rights & Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 2. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights & Convention on the Rights of the Child 3. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights & Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Ask the students to make a list of all the different issues/articles/provisions that relate to (i) the right to a nationality and (ii) the enjoyment of rights related to nationaliy. The students then discuss how the possession of a nationality or the lack of any nationality may influence the enjoyment of these rights. What have they learned about the position of stateless persons under human rights law? Exercise 10 Strengths and weaknesses of the 1954 Statelessness Convention Interactive classroom activity or take-home exercise Ask the students to read the following short extract from a case that came before the United States Supreme Court (Trop v. Dulles) in 1958. It discusses the impact of the withdrawal of nationality, resulting in statelessness: There may be involved no physical mistreatment, no primitive torture. There is instead the total destruction of the individual’s status in organised society. It is a form of punishment more primitive than torture for it destroys for the individual the political existence that was centuries in the development. The punishment strips the citizen of his status in the international political community. His very existence is at the sufferance of the country in which he happens to find himself. While any one country may accord him some rights, and presumably as long as he remained in this country he would enjoy the limited rights of an alien, no country need do so because he is stateless. Furthermore, his enjoyment of even the limited rights of an alien might be subject to termination at any time by reason of deportation. In short, the expatriate has lost the right to have rights. By now the students already have a good idea of some of the areas where non-citizens may be denied enjoyment of the full spectrum of human rights. Ask the students to take a minute to think about the areas in which general human rights law did not seem to offer all of the answers and stateless persons may find themselves in a vulnerable position (recall unit 9 and exercise 9). Then read through the articles of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. Your task is to evaluate this instrument. Think about the following questions: What do you find striking about the issues that are included or the way that the rights are elaborated? To what extent does this instrument deal with the problems uncovered earlier? Does it address those areas that you expected an instrument on the rights of stateless persons to deal with? 56 A Guide to Teaching on Statelessness