Preventing Statelessness Among Migrants and Refugees 6 Key Findings Procedural barriers to birth registration for the children of foreign parents greatly exacerbate the risks of statelessness already created by gaps in the legal framework. Despite high reported rates of birth registration in both Egypt and Morocco, many parents who are refugees, asylum seekers, or migrants struggle to register the births of their children. Migrants with irregular status have the most difficulty. The most important barriers in the host countries are: • The requirement to produce a marriage certificate to register a child (for all in Egypt, for Muslims in Morocco); • The requirement to prove legal (Egypt) or factual (Morocco) residence in the country; • The requirement (by law in Egypt, or in practice in Morocco) to produce currently valid identity documents for the parents; • The difficulty of proving the connection between parent and child in the absence of a birth notification from a registered health practitioner; • Parents’ lack of knowledge of the procedures and how to navigate them; • The short time period (15 days in Egypt, 30 in Morocco) for routine birth registration, and the costs and difficulty of late registration; • The lack of child protection services to secure late registration or other means of providing legal documents for vulnerable children. These difficulties were present in both countries, but appeared to be greater in Egypt. However, perhaps the greatest barrier was the difficulty of accessing consular services to obtain the documents required by the host country or to register the child’s birth with the country of origin: • Recognised refugees and asylum seekers would jeopardise their status by contacting their embassies, and even those who had not sought refugee status might fear to do so; • The high costs of renewing or replacing passports or acquiring official copies of marriage certificates often put the documents out of reach; • Many parents were unaware of requirements that birth registration in Egypt or Morocco also be transcribed by the consulate for the child to acquire the parent’s nationality, and there is little or no outreach by consulates to migrants with irregular status. The immediate consequences of these difficulties included the inaccessibility of education, health and other services for the children concerned, and greater vulnerability to exploitation. Less widely-reported consequences included the registration of children under the names of different adults who had the relevant documents, potentially resulting in the separation of parents and child in the event of resettlement or deportation. In the longer term, the consequences include the risk of statelessness. The administrative barriers to the acquisition of nationality need as much attention as the simple availability of birth registration and the minimum legal protections in both host and sending countries.