2 5. More than a quarter of a century before the adoption of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961), it had been observed – but only considering the need for advances in treaty-based international law and not taking into account general international law – that it was urgent to tackle the problem of stateless persons (both those who had never had a nationality and those who had had one and lost it), bearing in mind that the organization of the international community assumed that the normal condition of all individuals was to have a nationality, and that statelessness represented an anomaly with disastrous consequences for those in that situation. 2 6. After all, in international law, according to the writings of its founders, jus gentium was conceived to include not only States, but also individuals (subjects of rights and holders of obligations emanating directly from the law of the peoples) and already, in classical international law, the regime of nationality began to be regulated by basic principles of jus soli and jus sanguinis3 (at times in different combinations that did not exclude one another). This regime provided individuals with an important means of protecting their inherent rights, at least at the level of domestic law; these are the rights of each individual (who is the dominus litis when seeking their protection) and not of the State, whose raison d'être is based on certain fundamental principles, such as the protection of the individual. 4 7. However, with the passage of time, it became evident that the nationality regime was not always sufficient to provide protection under any and every circumstance (as evidenced, for example, by the situation of stateless persons). Throughout the twentieth century and to date, international human rights law has sought to remedy this deficiency or vacuum, by denationalizing protection (and thus including every individual, even stateless persons). As I pointed out more than two decades ago, nationality has ceased being the vinculum juris (distinct from diplomatic protection), and this came to be constituted by the condition of victim of the alleged human rights violations (in the fundamentally different context of the international protection of human rights). 5 8. The right to nationality is effectively a right inherent in the human being, embodied as a non-derogable right in the American Convention on Human Rights (Articles 20 and 27), as emphasized in this judgment (para. 136). It is also protected under the 1966 United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 24(3)), the United Nations 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 7), and the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (Article 29), and also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 15) and the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (Article 19) of 1948. Moreover, the Convention relating to the Status 2 . This observation had also been made in view of the perverse tendency (of that time) towards denationalization and de-naturalization (even as a punishment), which violated the “fundamental principles of the organization of the international community”, and owing to the need to tackle statelessness by eliminating its causes; J.-P.-A. François, "Le problème des apatrides", 53 Recueil des Cours de l'Académie de Droit International de La Haye (1935), pp. 371-372. 3 . Ibid., pp. 315 and 288. 4 . Ibid., pp. 316 and 318. And, for more general information, cf., e.g. P. Weis, Nationality and Statelessness in International Law, London, Stevens, 1956, pp. 3 ff. 5 . A.A. Cançado Trindade, The Application of the Rule of Exhaustion of Local Remedies in International Law, Cambridge, University Press, 1983, pp. 16-17, 19-20, 33, 35-36, 301 and 311-312.