22 Preventing Statelessness Among Migrants and Refugees While late registration is possible, it is more onerous. In Morocco, the system for late registration through the civil tribunals was perceived as difficult to access: the entire procedure is in Arabic, and all documents must be translated into Arabic and notarised. In the absence of a marriage certificate, it is difficult to show paternity; and without a birth notification even the parentage of the mother may be hard to prove. While practice varies, some groups providing assistance to migrants and refugees reported that tribunals could require testimony from up to 12 people, or from the mokaddem (local government official) of the neighbourhood where the parents live. In Egypt, the procedure for registration of a birth after more than 15 days is very long and elaborate, involving visiting multiple government offices, and providing all documents and information in Arabic, including a valid current residence permit, late birth notification, marriage certificate, police report, and declaration of paternity. If the birth registration is more than one year from the date of birth, further requirements apply. The process may take six to eight weeks. Unaccompanied and Other Vulnerable Children Both Morocco and Egypt have protections in their law that should provide the right to nationality for children found in their territory of unknown parentage. We cannot register children who were not born in Egypt. Some of us give birth on the way from Eritrea to Egypt. Some of us stayed for a long time in Sudan and gave birth there. We did not get birth certificates there. Here, we cannot provide the authorities with the documents to register the children. Someone told me we have to lie and say the child is born in Egypt to get the birth certificate. But they will know that the newcomers with older children could not have delivered here. What do we do now? — Eritrean The research in Egypt came across many cases of guardians taking care of unrelated children from their community, whether the parents were unknown, or dead, or had abandoned the child. This was especially the case among the Sudanese, South Sudanese, and Eritreans. There is a procedure for registering foundlings and abandoned children but very few migrants and refugees know about it and it takes a significant amount of time. There were also suggestions that this protection is not applied in case of children where there is the belief that the parents are originally from another country. Often, however, the parents are known, but no longer able or willing to look after the child. The adult caring for the child has no way of legalising this relationship and obtaining documents for the child. The only possibility may be to add the child on to a UNHCR refugee or asylum seeker card; but this will then require the parent to produce a birth certificate in order to renew the residence permit. The CMRS also heard of many unaccompanied and separated older children among the Ethiopian and the Eritrean communities, who had left their own countries alone: they lack any knowledge of the processes to gain identification documents, and fear approaching the embassy in case of being deported. Another category of children with no way to resolve a lack of documents were those who