the civil registry office in Toledo, despite the mother’s insecure residence status at the time. In three cases in Albania, although court procedures were required to resolve issues with parents and/or children’s lack of documentation, the children were successfully registered, and their Albanian nationality confirmed. 5.2 Lack of adequate mechanisms to identify and determine statelessness In many of the cases included in the research across the different countries, the lack of mechanisms or capacity to identify statelessness (risks) and lack of adequate procedures to determine statelessness were key factors contributing to children’s (prolonged) statelessness. All research countries are party to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and other relevant human rights instruments, which require them to grant adequate protection and rights to stateless people on their territory.21 To do so, they must have mechanisms in place to identify who is stateless on their territory, and should put in place dedicated statelessness determination procedures (SDP) that are fair, efficient, and easily accessible, in line with UNHCR guidelines.22 In many cases included in the research, the (risks of) statelessness of children and families was missed by authorities at all levels. Civil registry officials in Bulgaria failed to identify that a child born in Bulgaria to an Iraqi mother was born stateless due to that country’s gender discriminatory nationality laws. In another case, they attributed a nationality to a child on his birth certificate without verifying whether the child had in fact acquired that nationality from his parent. In several cases in the research, children and families of Palestinian origin were formally identified and registered by asylum authorities as having the nationality of ‘Palestine’, masking their potential statelessness and protection needs under the 1954 Convention. In one case in the Czech Republic, the court failed to consider a child’s statelessness despite its relevance to the case. In other cases, the identification and resolution of the risk of statelessness was hampered by the failure of consular authorities to respond to requests for information about their potential nationals. Three of the five participating countries have operational SDPs.23 The Czech Republic provides for statelessness to be identified and determined through other administrative 21 ENS (2021) Statelessness determination and protection in Europe: good practice, challenges, and risks: https://www.statelessness.eu/updates/publications/statelessnessindex-briefing-statelessness-determinationand-protection-europe 22 UNHCR (2014), Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons Under the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons: https://www.unhcr.org/dach/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2017/04/CHUNHCR_Handbook-on-Protection-ofStateless-Persons.pdf 23 Bulgaria, Spain, and Ukraine. Albania has recently adopted legislation to establish an SDP, but this was not yet operational at the time of the research.