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There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have been as shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler, the Jews were the "intellectual cement," the essentially cosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of this region. It was this small nation par excellence which added the quintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz further to the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his own macabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of this fructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of the smaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since the European revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from a semi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identities and historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.

Abstract The study of Mexican law and practice makes it apparent that the regulation of several consular and diplomatic functions within the frame-work of the protection of nationals and dual or multiple nationals abroad, inheritance upon death (successions mortis causa), family law and international judicial assistance, needs to be updated in accordance with the development of private international law, information technologies and ciberspace. Ongoing preparatory work in drafting National Rules on Civil and Family Law Procedure presents an opportunity and framework to that effect, opening space for inter alia: the legal recognition of electronic apostilles (e-APPs); for regulating consular intervention on behalf of minors and persons lacking full capacity; for reasserting the mandatory six-week deadline for the child's return in international child abduction procedures; as well as for enacting domestic provisions on the transmission and execution of requests of international judicial assistance by electronic means; as well as for digital research into foreign law. Mexico's leadership would likewise be enhanced through the promotion of multilateral protocols on the subject and the negotiation of international judicial technological interconnection agreements; through the updating of official guidelines on consular protection for dual or multiple nationals; through the statutory definition of Mexican authorities entrusted with executing foreign requests regarding Mexican law; and in particular through the launching of a Presidential Program on International Human Mobility and high level programs connected to The law of the international movement of persons.

Article 1 of the Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws permits "each state to determine under its own law who are its nationals." It is precisely because the loss and acquisition of nationality is a matter of unilateral state action that statelessness under certain conditions does occur. The loss of nationality is sometimes closely related to the methods by which nationality is acquired. Most common among these methods of acquisition are: (1) by birth, (2) by minority, (3) by marriage.

The right to nationality is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various international and regional human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the European Convention on Nationality. Nationality provides a link to a specific state, and, more importantly, it constitutes the condition sine qua non for the deployment of an array of human rights. Yet, states are unwilling to fully defer to international law the determination of the right to a nationality. This, in combination with gender-based discrimination in nationality laws, can strip individuals their right to a nationality. In the case of Syria, women cannot pass on their nationality to their children born in exile, creating a generation of stateless children. This paper analyses how the Women, Peace and Security ('WPS') agenda of the Security Council offers a solution to this problem and to challenge Syrian nationality laws. WPS provides a gender perspective and a human rights approach to conflict and post-conflict situations, including displacement. Nationality rights are only merely tackled in the WPS resolutions. Nonetheless, WPS is a strong tool to address the issue of statelessness created by the intersection of gender discriminatory laws, displacement, and an incomplete human rights framework.