MENNESSON v. FRANCE JUDGMENT 17 invalid for the purposes of Article 47 of the Civil Code, whereupon that provision was inoperative. They added that the thrust of the circular was not aimed at precluding the issuing of a certificate of nationality on the basis of a mere suspicion that recourse had been had to a surrogacy arrangement, and that it was therefore inoperative in respect of situations such as theirs in which the courts had explicitly found that there had been a surrogacy arrangement. In support of that argument, they stated that they had not received a reply to the request for a certificate of French nationality for the third and fourth applicants lodged by the first applicant with the registry of the Charenton-le-Pont District Court on 16 April 2013. They produced acknowledgment-of-receipt forms signed on 31 October 2013 and 13 March 2014 by the registrar indicating that the request “[was] still being processed in [his] department pending a reply to the request for authentication sent to the consulate of Los Angeles, California”. They added that, on account in particular of the Court of Cassation’s decisions of 13 September 2013, the first applicant could not recognise the third and fourth applicants even though he was their biological father. (ii) The Government 71. The Government submitted that the failure to register the particulars of foreign civil-status documents such as the birth certificates of the third and fourth applicants did not preclude them from taking full effect in France. They argued firstly that certificates of French nationality were issued on the basis of such certificates where it was established that one of the parents was French (the Government produced a copy of the circular of the Minister of Justice of 25 January 2013, and observed that the applicants had not taken any steps towards obtaining French nationality for the third and fourth applicants), and that minors could not be removed from France; secondly, the first and second applicants enjoyed full parental responsibility in respect of the third and fourth applicants, on the basis of the US civilstatus documents; thirdly, were the first and second applicants to divorce, the family-affairs judge would determine their place of residence and the contact rights of the parents as named in the foreign civil-status document; fourthly, as evidence of one’s status as heir could be provided by any means, the third and fourth applicants would be in a position to inherit under the first and second applicants’ estate on the basis of their US civilstatus documents, as provided for under ordinary law. The Government also observed that the applicants had overcome the problems they referred to as they did not claim to have been unable to register the third and fourth applicants for social-security purposes or enrol them at school or not to have received social benefits from the Family Allowances Office, and that, generally, they had not shown that they were faced with “numerous and daily difficulties” on account of the refusal to register the particulars of the children’s birth certificates. Accordingly, the Government questioned the