to access education, healthcare, or social protection. These factors contribute to the cycle of poverty, marginalisation and discrimination that traffickers deliberately exploit. By denying stateless children nationality, authorities and child protection systems have failed to safeguard them, instead placing them at a significantly heightened risk of trafficking for labour exploitation, sexual exploitation, forced criminality, forced marriage, domestic servitude, begging, and forced recruitment into armed groups. These abuses often occur with minimal risk of detection, accountability, or access to justice due to the children’s legal invisibility. 5. Lawful and safe migration pathways remain a fantasy to stateless children who are denied nationality, passports and visas, forcing them into irregular migration pathways which are riddled with exploitative networks and traffickers. This increases reliance on smugglers and informal networks and places children at high risk of trafficking throughout the migration process. Additionally, there is a higher risk of human trafficking among stateless girls who may be forced into child marriages in hopes of obtaining greater security and access to the benefits of citizenship. 6. While statelessness places children at a higher risk for being trafficked, it is also a consequence of trafficking itself, including where children are separated from families, deliberately stripped of documentation, or born into situations of exploitation or displacement where birth registration is inaccessible. ii. Gender discrimination in nationality laws contributes to statelessness and child trafficking 7. Twenty-four 1 countries presently have nationality laws that deny women the right to confer nationality on their children on an equal basis with men. More than forty countries 2 have nationality laws with some gender-discriminatory provisions, such as denying women the right to confer nationality on foreign spouses, or the right to acquire, change, or retain their own nationality on an equal basis with men. Gender discrimination in nationality laws is a primary cause of statelessness and undermines women’s equal status within society and the family. Even if not left stateless, those denied access to their mother’s nationality due to gender discrimination in the nationality law, including when that country is their country of birth and residence, also face an increased risk of trafficking, as a result of their vulnerable status in that country and their lack of access to a range of social services and rights. 8. Furthermore, by exacerbating women’s unequal status in society, such discriminatory laws contribute to an environment where women’s economic and other opportunities are constrained because of their gender, thereby contributing to the root causes and vulnerabilities linked with gender-based violence, including human trafficking and child marriage. As global migration continues to increase, larger populations will be directly impacted by gender discrimination in nationality laws due to increased numbers of international marriages and children born to parents of different nationalities. Ensuring that nationality laws and practices are compliant with Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and international law is therefore of direct concern to efforts to prevent and combat trafficking in women and girls. 1 Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, ‘The problem’, available at: https://www.equalnationalityrights.org/the-problem/. 2 Ibid. 2