188 A. J. PETROZZIELLO The value of taking an intersectional approach is underscored by the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination that are present, as evidenced in the reviews of eight different treaty bodies. Consider the example of the Dominican Republic (DR), which has received the highest number of UN recommendations on the matter in the world (as seen in Table 1). When blocked access to birth registration for children of Haitian ancestry born in the DR has been brought before the committees, these have recognized it as (1) gender discrimination, because it violates women’s equal right to confer nationality on their children (CEDAW, art. 9); (2) structural racial discrimination (CERD); (3) a violation of children’s human right to a name and a nationality (CRC, art. 8); and (4) a violation of fundamental human rights, including the right to a nationality, which generates statelessness (UPR, ICCPR). Were the country signatory to the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (CMW), it also might have been called out for discrimination based on migratory status, because issuance of birth certificates is made contingent on the parents’ status. This contravenes jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, whose landmark 2005 judgment against the DR stated: “The migratory status of a person … can never constitute a justification for depriving a person of the right to nationality. … The migratory status of a person is not transmitted to the children” (Case of the Girls Yean and Bosico v. The Dominican Republic, 2005, para. 156). In sum, taking an intersectional methodological approach entailed looking across all the treaty bodies’ recommendations on the same issue, in order to reveal the patterns of exclusion affecting multiply marginalized population groups. Where a country has received UN observations from multiple committees on the same issue, this is an indicator that multiple structures of power are interlocking to produce statelessness. Intersectional insights on blocked access to birth registration To demonstrate the value of intersectionality as a methodological approach for human rights research, this section offers three insights about blocked access to birth certificates which were only possible to identify because of this approach. Gender + religious + ethnic discrimination at the civil registrar Whereas the mainstream understanding of the relationship between gender discrimination and statelessness focuses on GDNL (van Waas et al., 2019), an intersectional approach broadens current understanding of the relationship between gender inequality and statelessness by demonstrating how different iterations of gendered power relations block access to birth certificates. It also demonstrates the importance of going beyond legal reform to address the multiple root causes of exclusion. In many locations, gender discrimination combines with discrimination on the grounds of religion or ethnicity to administratively (but not necessarily legally) block access to birth certificates for children born to women from religious and ethnic minority groups. This can perpetuate the systematic denial of citizenship and disenfranchisement for a certain population group, but it is operationalized through the birth mother’s status and documentation. Consider the example of Madagascar, a country that reformed its nationality laws to eliminate gender discrimination but in which intersecting forms of discrimination continue to block certain groups of women from registering and/or obtaining citizenship for their children. Madagascar updated its 1960 Nationality Code in 2017 to allow Malagasy mothers to transmit their nationality to their children on an equal basis with Malagasy men, regardless of their marital status (Equality Now, 2022). Having received observations from five different human rights mechanisms starting in 2008, the government was quick to announce it had eliminated gender discrimination from its nationality policy in its 2018 state report to the CMW (Government of Madagascar, 2018). Previously, the Nationality Code was found to create a narrower set of circumstances in