CHAPTER I ANNEXES 27 RECOMMENDATIONS 56 Law on Citizenship, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Ministry of Civil Affairs, Official Gazette of BiH, No. 4/97, 13/99, 41/02, 6/03, 14/03, 82/05, 43/09, 76/09 and 87/13, adopted 22 January 2014 [in Bosnian]; see also Good practices in nationality laws for the prevention and reduction of statelessness, UNHCR, IPU, November 2018, p. 23. See UNHCR, Guidelines on Statelessness No. 4; UNHCR, UNICEF, Ending Childhood Statelessness in Europe; UNHCR and IPU, Good practices in nationality laws for the prevention and reduction of statelessness. CHAPTER VII 55 CHAPTER VI Furthermore, safeguards against statelessness must protect children from discriminatory laws; for example, laws which do not allow women to confer nationality to their children on an equal basis with men, or laws which do not allow children to acquire nationality due CHAPTER V It is also good practice to adopt legal provisions to facilitate the acquisition of nationality for children in particularly vulnerable situations, such as the children of national minorities, refugees or victims of trafficking. CHAPTER IV Best practice is for nationality to be acquired automatically at birth. If nationality is not acquired at birth, there should either be no cut-off in the age by which an entitlement to nationality is lost, or, if there is a deadline, there must be a period of eligibility to acquire nationality when the child reaches adulthood; and there should be allowances made in exceptional cases where the deadline is not met, to avoid penalising stateless people for the failure of their parents, the State or others to address their statelessness during their childhood.56 CHAPTER III Any restrictions on nationality relating to criminality should be narrowly construed, in line with international human rights law, and any convictions must have been made in accordance with adequate due process safeguards — i.e., if a person has been arbitrarily convicted of an offence, or their prosecution amounted to persecution, they cannot properly be excluded from the protections of the statelessness conventions for this reason. OSCE participating States should also consider that refugees and stateless people may not be able to acquire documents proving lack of criminal history in another country. In an example of good practice in this regard, in 2014, Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted a by-law exempting stateless people from the requirement to provide documents from other countries to prove they have no criminal history when applying for naturalization.55 CHAPTER II the child to acquire the nationality of their country of birth. There should be no language requirements, no good character requirements beyond those established in the 1961 Convention, and no prohibitive fees or other barriers to the acquisition of nationality.