Human Rights And Statelessness I N P E N I N S U L AR M AL AYS I A other nationality. In summary, the Convention would provide robust legal provisions for Malaysia to implement and apply to prevent statelessness at birth. Accession to the 1951 Convention provides protection for stateless persons with a migratory background (i.e. stateless refugees), and in practice is the only pathway to protection for this group of stateless persons in Malaysia. Most of the rights granted to stateless persons under the 1954 Convention are the same as those granted to refugees under the 1951 Convention due to its shared drafting history. The 1951 Convention would provide a refugee determination procedure and specific provisions (that is not available in the 1954 Convention) such as non-penalisation for unlawful entry or presence and non-refoulement that forbids a country from returning a refugee or asylum seeker to a country where they will be subject to persecution. These two principles would provide protections for stateless refugees in Malaysia who have historically been detained upon entry or deported back to their home countries. The 1951 Convention is far more established with 148 parties compared to the 1954 Convention with 95 parties, and it gives greater sets of rights at the national level. In summary, the 1951 Convention would provide much needed protections of rights for stateless refugees from arrest, abuse, and deportation by the Malaysian authorities. Neither the 1954 Convention nor the 1951 Convention provides for an international body which monitors compliance and would enforce Malaysia’s obligations towards ensuring the rights of stateless persons. Therefore, the accountability mechanisms offered by these treaties are rather limited. However, the UNHCR has supervisory responsibilities, and disputes between contracting states regarding how to apply the Convention can be brought before the International Court of Justice. Malaysia must remove the reservations on the Articles related to the right to nationality in the CRC, CEDAW, and CRPD, and ratify the ICCPR and ICERD because these core international human rights treaties have provisions on the right to nationality (as outlined in Table 6) that will supplement the provisions in the 1961 Convention, 1954 Convention and 1951 Convention. In contrast to the 1951 and 1954 Conventions, these other treaties all have monitoring bodies consisting of human rights experts whose role 46