COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF RACE AND LAW VOL. 11 JANUARY 2021 NO. 1 ARTICLE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN NATIONALITY LAWS: A DOCTRINAL BLIND SPOT OF INTERNATIONAL LAW? Michelle Foster* and Timnah Rachel Baker† Statelessness has historically been overlooked by the international community, but it is now a significant focus of the work of academics, advocates, and international institutions. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ campaign to end statelessness by 2024 is now past its half-way point. Yet, while it is understood that statelessness is often the result of systemic racial discrimination, the relationship between statelessness, nationality laws, and international norms of racial non-discrimination has received very little scholarly attention. This Article addresses the lacuna in existing legal scholarship, and indeed in jurisprudential analysis, of racial discrimination in nationality matters, by undertaking the first in-depth examination of the history, interpretation, and application of Article 1(3) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and its consistency with the jus cogens prohibition on racial discrimination. While focused explicitly on a particular treaty provision, this analysis raises * LL.B., BCom (Hons) (University of New South Wales); LL.M., S.J.D. (University of Michigan); Professor and Director, Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School. The authors are very grateful to Hannah Gordon, B.A., J.D. (University of Melbourne) Research Assistant, Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness for exceptional research assistance. We are also very grateful to Professor E. Tendayi Achiume, UCLA, and participants at the World Conference on Statelessness, The Hague, June 2019, for very helpful comments on an earlier draft. Any errors or omissions remain our own. † B.A./LL.B. (Monash University); LL.M. (Boston College); Ph.D. candidate (The University of Sydney Law School).