186 A. J. PETROZZIELLO Whereas some human rights studies have examined the potential of individual treaty bodies for upholding the right to birth registration—especially the CRC (Stein, 2016) and the Human Rights Committee (Castan et al., 2011)—this study adopted an intersectional methodological approach in order to overcome the prevailing siloed approach to the issue of birth registration. This entailed an examination of the concluding observations issued on the matter from all the relevant human rights mechanisms. The study design was influenced by Bhabha’s (2011) edited volume, Children Without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge, in two ways. That study demonstrated the usefulness of tracing a particular human rights challenge—in her case, child statelessness—across a range of contexts in order to elevate the visibility of the problem and conceptualize how it is produced from a global perspective. Second, Bhabha’s conceptualization of the scope of child statelessness brings together distinct categories of people—the de jure (or legally) stateless people and the de facto stateless (who may have a nationality but lack legal status where they reside, such as migrants with irregular status or asylum seekers). This study adopts a similar approach—except instead of taking the child as the starting point, it brings into view the experiences of diverse groups of parents on the move, and the ways their precarious status and intersecting forms of discrimination can impact their children’s access to the right to birth registration. This is an important corrective to much of the literature on children’s rights. Children do not emerge from nowhere; in particular, the birth mother’s access to her own legal status and related rights are linked to the child’s. It also demonstrates the value of relationality, a point taken up in the following section and the conclusion. To operationalize intersectionality as method, the research design examined relevant recommendations from all of the treaty bodies. The main dataset used to construct the Global Inventory of Exclusionary Birth Registration Practices (hereafter Global Inventory) was the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion’s Database on Statelessness and Human Rights (ISI, 2020). The database includes recommendations issued to states within the UN human rights system that are related to stateless persons, nationality, children, discrimination, and implementing measures. At the time the queries for this project were performed (June 2022), the database contained recommendations from all the available sessions of the UPR and the Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW), as well as recommendations issued since 2010 by the CRC; the CEDAW; the CERD; the Committee Against Torture (CAT); and the Human Rights Committee, which monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by its State parties (ICCPR). The results—which are discussed more fully in Petrozziello (2023; forthcoming)—establish the global scope of the problem: a total of 756 recommendations issued to a total of 143 UN member states on discriminatory birth registration practices. The sample was narrowed further to the 230 issued to a total of 143 UN member states that mention birth registration in relation to the prevention or reduction of statelessness. Among these, 58 countries were prioritized for qualitative content analysis because they mention migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers and/or they received more than one recommendation. Once the sample had been drawn, brief summaries were prepared for each country in which “practices of concern” were identified, based on secondary sources. The country summaries list all the recommendations issued by the different human rights mechanisms and describe the practice of concern that led the committee to issue the recommendation in the first place. So, the research strategy was to work backward from the concluding observations of the treaty body, by examining secondary sources available on the relevant treaty body website, including state party reports and replies to the lists of issues, committee documents (e.g., report of the working group, concluding observations, requests for information), alternative reports and stakeholder submissions by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academics, UN entities, and other observers. Content analysis (Hermann, 2008; Krippendorff, 2013) via qualitative coding was carried out in two phases. In the first, UN treaty body recommendations were compiled in an Excel sheet

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