17 “ The Committee also recalls the provisions of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness which state that the outcome of an application for citizenship, legal residence or similar status by the parents of a child born on the territory should not prejudice the right of the child to acquire the nationality of the State party where the child would otherwise be stateless”. 130 Moreover, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights is also instructive. In the decision on Mennesson v. France, the court ruled that although the parents may have chosen to break the law (in that case, by using surrogacy to commission children even though this is prohibited under French legislation), the effects of France’s denial of certain elements of the children’s identity were not limited to the parents alone – they affect the children. In that context, “a serious question arises at to the compatibility of that situation with the child’s best interests, respect for which must guide any decision in their regard”.131 Thus, the prevention of childhood statelessness must not to be confused with immigration control considerations. In November 2014, the Netherlands articulated their fear of abandoning the requirement of lawful stay as a condition for the acquisition of nationality by stating that “the failure [of the parents] to cooperate with departure from the country would be rewarded in this manner”.132 Put more generally, governments seem apprehensive of a pull-factor for stateless migrants to come to and parent children in the country as a means to indirectly secure a right of residence themselves. The Netherlands currently require at least three years of legal stay from the child in order for them to be eligible for the acquisition of Dutch nationality.133 However, the United Kingdom has a safeguard that requires only habitual residence.134 Between 2001 and 2010, only five children acquired British nationality via this system.135 The data indicates that the British safeguard without a lawful residence requirement does not create an influx of people seeking to make opportunistic use of the law. LEAVING CHILDREN IN LIMBO, WITH ‘NATIONALITY UNKNOWN’ One of the most troubling manifestations of problems in the implementation of safeguards to ensure the child’s right to acquire a nationality is the practice of labelling children as being of unknown or undetermined nationality, rather than identifying them as (otherwise) stateless. This precludes them benefiting from the operation of the relevant safeguard. In a number of European countries, the phenomenon of registering children as “nationality unknown” has achieved worrying proportions, both in terms of scale and duration, with many thousands of children left in limbo like this and their status still not clarified even by the time they reach adulthood.136 This stands at odds with the CRC, which protects the right of every child to acquire a nationality. Furthermore, it is clearly not in a child’s best interests for them to languish in uncertainty with regard to their nationality – a key part of their identity – throughout their childhood.137 Rather, states need to determine whether a child would otherwise be stateless as soon as possible so as to be in line with the CRC138 and “not to prolong a child’s status of undetermined nationality [and] for the application of Articles 1 and 4 of the 1961 Convention, it is appropriate that such a period not exceed five years”.139 Recent case law of the European Court of Human Rights may prove highly significant here. In the 2014 ruling of Mennesson v. France, the applicants faced “a worrying uncertainty as to the possibility of obtaining recognition of French nationality”.140 The Court determined that “everyone must be able to establish the substance of his or her identity” and that the uncertainty the applicants faced in this regard “is liable to have negative repercussions on the definition of their personal identity”.141 On this basis, the Court found that France had violated the applicants’ right to respect for private life, protected under article 8 of the ECHR. Although such a case has yet to be brought before the Court, a similar finding may also be reached where a state fails to ascertain – within a reasonable period – whether a child born on the territory is stateless and should therefore be granted nationality under applicable domestic safeguards and instead allows the limbo of ‘nationality unknown’ to endure.142 It is noteworthy that Finland has another, distinct category in its Population Information System: besides “stateless” and “unknown nationality”, there is also the label “pending clarification”. This category is most often used, in practice, for the registration of children born in Finland whose citizenship status is pending determination and 92.6% of those registered as such in 2011 were between the age of birth and four years old. From age five onwards, the number of persons whose nationality is “pending clarification” drops away significantly, to a mere handful for each subsequent five year age bracket. This suggests that such a label is indeed transitional and further action is undertaken by the state to ensure that the nationality status of the children concerned is clarified. Nevertheless, the retention of an “unknown nationality” category alongside this, comprising a total of some 800 people aged five or over (alongside over 700 stateless persons), suggests that this system is also not watertight.143 Moreover, it would be instructive to conduct a further study of the Finnish practice in this regard to discover whether there are elements of good practice that could be exported to other European states.