to challenge decisions relating to their care arrangements. Further, when families are divided, children who are stateless or lack a legal identity often encounter barriers to reunification with parents and relatives. A lack of documentation combined with excessive evidentiary and bureaucratic requirements can work against the best interests of stateless children and prevent or delay family reunification. 3. There are multiple intersecting factors that leave children at heightened risk of statelessness including discriminatory laws, a lack of access to civil registration, conflict and forced migration.6 Many of these factors can additionally cause and/or prolong the separation of children from their family. Discriminatory civil registration processes or nationality laws can be a causal factor in childhood statelessness as well as family separation. For example, in some countries there are multiple barriers to registering children that are born to unmarried mothers including stigma and fear of State authorities. As such, children born outside of marriage are at greater risk of statelessness.7 In such situations, children are also more likely to be abandoned. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, unmarried parents have abandoned unregistered infants in order to avoid facing criminal charges. As a result, children are unable to access care within the family. They also remain unregistered, and experience social stigma for being born to unmarried parents.8 In the Dominican Republic, children born to parents of Haitian descent face numerous bureaucratic obstacles and are often unable to access Dominican nationality. Many new-born infants are left abandoned in Dominican hospitals without being registered at birth.9 4. Further, in some countries discriminatory citizenship laws prevent nationality from being transmitted to a child through their mother. Over the past year, some children unable to access nationality for this reason, have not been able to return to their country of origin because they are not recognised as nationals by State authorities.10 For example, in Lebanon, women cannot confer nationality to their children on an equal basis as men. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Lebanese Government allowed nationals to return from abroad, but children without a claim to Lebanese nationality through their fathers, have been refused entry due to their non-citizen status. This has caused family separations leaving children at risk.11 Jyothi Kanics, ‘Migration, forced displacement, and childhood statelessness’, ISI, (2017), available at: http://children.worldsstateless.org/3/migration-displacement-and-childhood-statelessness/migration-forced-displacement-and-childhoodstatelessness.html (accessed 20/05/2021). 7 Betsy Fisher, ‘Why Non-Marital Children in the MENA Region Face a Risk of Statelessness’, HHRJ, (2015), pages 1 and 2, available at: https://ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Children/BirthRegistrationMarginalized/B.Fisher_1.pdf (accessed 28/06/2021) 8 Ibid. 9 Johanna Matos, ‘Cientos de niños son dejados abandonados por sus padres en hospitales y otros puntos’, El Día, (January 2020), available at: https://eldia.com.do/cientos-de-ninos-son-dejados-abandonados-por-sus-padres-en-hospitales-y-otros-puntos/ (accessed 25/05/2021). Only 41% of children born in public hospitals are registered before leaving these buildings Alfonso F. Reca, ‘The Dominican Republic’s invisible children’, UNICEF, (July 2017), available at: https://www.unicef.org/stories/dominican-republics-invisible-children (accessed 25/05/2021). 10 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI), ‘Together We Can: The COVID-19 Impact on Stateless People and a Roadmap for Change’, (June 2021), page 32, available at: https://files.institutesi.org/together_we_can_report_2021.pdf (accessed 28/06/2021) 11 Ibid. 6