MENNESSON v. FRANCE JUDGMENT 23 lodged with the Court. Accordingly, the applicants’ observations and the Government’s replies suggest that the rules of private international law render recourse to Article 18 of the Civil Code in order to establish the French nationality of the third and fourth applicants particularly complex, not to mention uncertain, in the present case. Secondly, the Court notes that the Government rely on Article 47 of the Civil Code. Under that provision, civil-status certificates drawn up abroad and worded in accordance with the customary procedures of the country concerned are deemed valid “save where other certificates or documents held, external data, or particulars in the certificate itself establish ... that the document in question is illegal, forged, or that the facts stated therein do not match the reality”. The question therefore arises whether that exception applies in a situation such as the present case, where it has been observed that the children concerned were born as the result of a surrogacy agreement performed abroad, which the Court of Cassation has deemed a circumvention of the law. Although they were invited by the President to answer that question and specify whether there was a risk that a certificate of nationality thus drawn up would subsequently be contested and annulled or withdrawn, the Government have not provided any indications. Moreover, the request lodged for that purpose on 16 April 2013 with the registry of the Charentonle-Pont District Court by the first applicant was still pending eleven months later. The senior registrar indicated on 31 October 2013 and on 13 March 2014 that it was “still being processed in [his] department pending a reply to the request for authentication sent to the consulate of Los Angeles, California” (see paragraph 28 above). 91. To that must be added the entirely understandable concerns regarding the protection of family life between the first and second and the third and fourth applicants in the event of the first applicant’s death or the couple’s separation. 92. However, whatever the degree of the potential risks for the applicants’ family life, the Court considers that it must determine the issue having regard to the practical obstacles which the family has had to overcome on account of the lack of recognition in French law of the legal parent-child relationship between the first two applicants and the third and fourth applicants (see, mutatis mutandis, X, Y and Z [v. the United Kingdom, 22 April 1997], § 48[, Reports of Judgments and Decisions 1997-II]). It notes that the applicants do not claim that it has been impossible to overcome the difficulties they referred to and have not shown that the inability to obtain recognition of the legal parent-child relationship under French law has prevented them from enjoying in France their right to respect for their family life. In that connection it observes that all four of them were able to settle in France shortly after the birth of the third and fourth applicants, are in a position to live there together in conditions broadly comparable to those of other families and that there is nothing to