14 challenges disproportionately impact children born to Roma parents, often due to intersecting barriers such as antigypsyism, parents’ inability to obtain documents, geographic isolation, and a lack of information, awareness, and trust in public authorities among marginalised communities. While the law in most Beneficiaries provides that children should be registered irrespective of their parents’ residence or documentation status, the reality is that undocumented parents – and particularly mothers encounter significant obstacles in registering the births of their children. In practice, registration processes are underpinned by inflexible and often discretionary documentation requirements, including requirements to produce identity documents, residence permits, proof of address, and marriage certificates. For those without such documents, navigating civil registration systems becomes nearly impossible in the absence of institutional flexibility and legal assistance. Among the most pressing challenges is the lack of legal clarity in complex cases, such as when parents are undocumented, unregistered, or foreign citizens without lawful residence, which often leaves them unable to access birth registration. In such cases, broad discretion afforded to civil registry officials can lead to inconsistent practices, with parents frequently turned away or misinformed. In the absence of dedicated support mechanisms or proactive outreach by the authorities, many families miss birth registration deadlines, leaving children without immediate access to a legal identity. This gap is rarely met with effective responses to rectify the situation, and instead responsibility is shifted onto parents who are already navigating precarious and exclusionary systems. A fear of the authorities may deter undocumented families from engaging with services, particularly where data sharing between civil registries and enforcement bodies is permitted or insufficiently regulated. Moreover, access to healthcare plays a pivotal role in shaping access to birth registration across the region. In most cases, healthcare settings or health professionals must initiate birth registration, and in some cases, there are proposals to automate birth registration in maternity settings to facilitate the procedure. However, in all Beneficiaries, where women do not give birth in a healthcare setting, further action is required to complete birth registration. This has a disproportionate impact on Roma women’s ability to register births as they often face barriers to accessing reproductive and maternity healthcare due to discrimination, mistrust of public services, geographic isolation, lack of health insurance, and unregulated civil status, among other factors. Women who are undocumented, stateless, or without regulated residence status often face compounded barriers: they may be excluded from services outright, discouraged by the risk of interaction with immigration authorities, or deterred by bureaucratic demands for documents they cannot provide. Even where entitlements exist in principle, they may be undermined in practice by discriminatory attitudes or institutional policies that condition access to maternity care on proof of legal identity. These barriers result in a significant number of births occurring outside the healthcare system, and in such cases, the absence of a medical professional to verify and document the birth becomes a key obstacle. Health professionals may be unwilling or unable to issue a declaration of birth if they were not present, particularly where liability concerns or institutional rules discourage flexibility. Individuals who lack health insurance may also lack access to a health professional to certify the birth. This creates a vicious cycle: exclusion from healthcare leads to exclusion from registration, which in turn risks children not being registered, thus perpetuating the risk of statelessness. Moreover, the burden of resolving these issues typically falls on mothers, who are often expected to navigate complex bureaucracies, meet tight deadlines, and provide extensive documentation, often without legal assistance or support. Where women have limited autonomy, lower literacy, or constrained mobility, this burden is further exacerbated. While healthcare access is frequently discussed in general terms, its impact on birth registration is intersectional: it is women, particularly those from marginalised communities and already in precarious socioeconomic circumstances, who are left to bear both the physical and bureaucratic consequences of exclusion. Ensuring that all women have access to universal reproductive health and maternity care is not only a critical matter of individual rights and wellbeing, but also a necessary condition for safeguarding every child’s right to immediate birth registration, legal identity, and citizenship. Moreover, where initial barriers prevent children from being registered at birth, inflexible late registration procedures and the absence of child-sensitive safeguards can further increase the risk of statelessness. Once the legally prescribed timeframe has passed, the pathway to late registration in some Beneficiaries is highly bureaucratic and often costly. Late registration procedures may involve additional documentation requirements