"Building a Better Refugee Status Determination System": Introduction
The numbers that provide a context for this issue on refugee status determination (RSD), though stark and well-known, bear repeating. In excess of two hundred million people live outside of their country of nationality. (1) Sixty-seven million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes. (2) Twelve million individuals have no country of nationality. (3) Of these overlapping populations, only about eleven million (4) fall under the definition of "refugee" within the meaning of the term set out in the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (5) and as defined in the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951. (6) In these statistics lie the challenges of refugee status determination (RSD): determining who is a "refugee" and, conversely, who is not. As to how this task should be accomplished, neither the treaty nor the statute is of much direct assistance: there are 46 articles in the Refugee Convention and 22 paragraphs in the Statute of UNHCR, none of which address the issue of RSD. And yet every year, over half a million individuals approach state or UNHCR officials and seek a determination that they are refugees. In Canada alone, over 25,000 individuals seek recognition of their status as refugees every year. (7) Decisions are made by states and UNHCR in a similar number of claims and there is a slowly shrinking backlog of 750,000 individuals who continue to await a determination of their status. Decisions are issued by a variety of officials and institutions: administrative officers of a state, quasi-judicial tribunals, courts, members of the political executive of states, and by agencies of the United Nations. (8) Amongst policy makers the problematic of RSD--of sorting out the eleven million refugees from a larger group of migrants and displaced persons--has become known as "the asylum-migration nexus" (9) or, more recently and more prosaically, the problem of "refugee protection and durable solutions in the context of international migration" (10) The articles in this issue of Refuge directly and indirectly engage with this problematic but collectively see the problem less as ensuring migrants do not access refugee protection and more as ensuring that refugee protection is in fact offered and legal protections guaranteed to refugees. As Care points out in his article in this issue, RSD has been with us in one form or another for more than a century. However, it has only been within the past few decades that RSD processes became widely entrenched in most Northern countries. As a guide to the more recent development of RSD, it is now almost three decades since the UNHCR's seminal global survey of RSD processes and the publication of its handbook on how RSD decisions should be made. Before these publications, there was almost nothing by way of common standards and guidelines that extended beyond the parochial study of the system presently in place in any given country. In the 30 years since these publications, a vast scholarship has emerged on the criteria that should be applied by decision-makers in RSD or, in short, the definition of a refugee. The cornerstones of the refugee law scholarship addressed in this issue were laid by Grahl-Madsen (11), Goodwin-Gill (12) and Hathaway. (13) Their work has enduring worth but precious little to say about RSD. Perhaps the neglect of RSD is simply a reflection of a relative inattention in the scholarship and in practice to the processes of law as opposed to its substance. Nonetheless, the debate over RSD has increased in recent years. European states and civil society turned their attention to the issue in the drafting of the European Union's minimum standards on RSD. (14) NGOs from the Global South have campaigned for UNHCR to reform its RSD. (15) Throughout the late 1990's numerous countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, immersed themselves in debates over the reform of their RSD processes. …
The implementation of the Convention relating to the status of stateless persons : procedures and practice in selected EU States
The treatment of non-refugee stateless persons varies greatly across the States of the European Union. Not much is known about it and it is disputed whether, and to what extent, national mechanisms are in line with the corresponding international obligations. 
 
In light of the differences observed, this thesis argues that the recognition of stateless status and the related application of a basic set of rights, according to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (the ‘1954 Convention’), are more likely to occur when Member States incorporate specific laws and procedures. In particular, the protection of stateless persons is more effective when Member States rigorously address the issue of identification of statelessness by adopting exact provisions rather than simply modifying existing norms and making marginal changes to immigration laws. Although the 1954 Convention does not explicitly require that a procedure or specific means for determining statelessness be established, it sets forth standards of treatment which can only be put into practice if its beneficiaries have been recognised. Effective protection also necessitates taking measures to remove obstacles of general applicability and publicity of rights and procedures. 
 
By analysing the treatment of claims for protection by stateless persons in ten European Union States that have ratified the 1954 Convention, this research contributes to the questions of whether detailed statelessness determination procedures are needed, what their constituent elements should be, how decision-makers apply the definition of ‘stateless person’, and what rights are attached to the grant of lawful status. It highlights shortcomings as well as good models of the national legal frameworks, and makes recommendations for further developments. Against this backdrop, it adds insights to the wider debate on how human rights treaties should be implemented by demonstrating that their formal incorporation into the national frameworks is desirable to ensure certainty and effectiveness of the law.
The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey
Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction to the Paperback Edition Chapter 3 Introduction Chapter 4 The Beginning of the Odyssey Chapter 5 Odysseus Chapter 6 Gods and Men Chapter 7 The Encounter of Odysseus and Athena Chapter 8 The Double Theodicy of the Odyssey Chapter 9 Appendix: Demodocus and Homer Chapter 10 Bibliography Chapter 11 Index of Sources Chapter 12 Index of Names and Subjects