Birth Registration and Consular Assistance in Egypt and Morocco 9 ties in securing birth registration for their children in the host country. While the practical barriers to registration are similar, a legal status as asylum seeker, refugee, or irregular migrant creates additional difficulties, especially in approaching the consulate of the country of origin. The main barriers were requirements for the parents themselves to present valid documents, including marriage certificates; and the impossibility for some, especially (but not only) refugees, of obtaining those documents from their consular authorities. Many migrants and refugees interviewed had no idea that, in many cases, births must also be registered with their consular authorities for the legal connection between parents and child to be recognised in the home country; and consular authorities showed little concern to provide assistance. In some cases, the barriers appeared deliberately created; but many were simply the Kafkaesque outcomes of clashing procedural expectations among the legal systems of different countries. Given the precariousness of their daily lives, it could not be a priority for those we interviewed to break through these barriers and bear the costs in order to secure birth registration for their children. There are no effective protection systems to provide paperwork for children separated from their parents, or to recognise a legal connection to those who have become their guardians. Amidst an international focus on the importance of ‘legal identity’, there is insufficient attention to the resolution of these problems, leaving those affected at significant risk of statelessness. Research Objectives The research project was designed to consider the protections that need to be in place to prevent statelessness among children born outside the country of nationality of (one of) their parents; as well as the obstacles that stand in the way of adults seeking documents to establish their own identity and nationality. The nationality law provisions in North Africa that leave children and adults at risk of statelessness are already documented.12 However, the procedural constraints to recognition and transmission of nationality based on identity of parents and location of birth are less well understood. Our aim was to understand these constraints through interviews with individuals seeking birth registration and other documents, with civil registration officials of the host states, and with consular officials of the sending states. Bronwen Manby, Citizenship Laws in Africa: A Comparative Study, 3rd edition (New York: Open Society Foundations, 2016); Zahra Albarazi, ‘Regional report on citizenship: The Middle East and North Africa (MENA)’, Global Citizenship Observatory, 2017; Laura Van Waas, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Nationality Laws in the MENA Region’, Tilburg University, September 2014; Women’s Refugee Commission & Tilburg University, ‘Our Motherland, Our Country: Gender Discrimination and Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa’, June 2013; Delphine Perrin, ‘Immigration and Citizenship Law in the Maghreb: Turning Aliens into Citizens’, European University Institute, Working Paper RSCAS 2011/40; Delphine Perrin ‘Identité et transmission du lien national au Maghreb: étude comparée des codes de la nationalité’, L’Année du maghreb, III, 2007. 12