13. In the second cycle, during the 26th session, South Sudan received two recommendations, from the Central African Republic and Mexico to improve birth registration throughout the country to secure children’s rights. Both recommendations were accepted.1 14. In the third cycle, during the 40th session, Cote d’Ivoire, Eswatini and Paraguay recommended that South Sudan accede to the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. It accepted all of the recommendations. 2 In 2024, South Sudan acceded to both Conventions.3 15. In 2022, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) expressed concern about low birth registration coverage in South Sudan, increasing children’s risk of statelessness. It recommended that South Sudan, inter alia, promote awareness about the importance of registration and consider mobile teams to support rural registration.4 16. In 2021, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) raised concern about the fact that in practice women are required to have a male witness to prove their nationality to the authorities. It recommended that South Sudan act with respect to the gender related dimensions of statelessness to ensure women are not subject to additional requirements to prove identification, to improve birth registration procedures, to collect disaggregated data on stateless women and girls and to ratify the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.5 South Sudan’s International obligations International Legal Framework 17. South Sudan has a range of international obligations to protect the right to a nationality and the rights of stateless persons. The right to a nationality and prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of nationality is recognised in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 18. South Sudan is a party to several key international treaties that contain relevant safeguards. These include the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Articles 2, 3, 7 and 8), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Article 9), and the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol.6 1 UN Human Rights Council, ‘Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: South Sudan’, December 2016, A/HRC/34/13, available at: https://docs.un.org/A/HRC/34/13. 2 UN Human Rights Council, ‘Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: South Sudan’, March 2022, A/HRC/50/14, available at: https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/50/14. 3 ‘UNHCR welcomes South Sudan’s accession to two UN Statelessness Conventions’, November 2024, available at: https://reliefweb.int/report/south-sudan/unhcr-welcomes-south-sudans-accession-two-un-statelessness-conventions. 4 Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Concluding observations on the initial report of South Sudan’, October 2022, available at: https://docs.un.org/CRC/C/SSD/CO/1. 5 Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, ‘Concluding observations on the initial report of South Sudan’, November 2021, available at: https://docs.un.org/en/CEDAW/C/SSD/CO/1. 6 UN Treaty Collection, available at: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/Treaties.aspx?id=4&subid=A&clang=_en. 3