Rather, Côte d’Ivoire must urgently adopt implementing legislation, including administrative regulations addressed to courts, civil registrars, and social services agencies, to provide clear instructions to reduce statelessness and the risk of statelessness among children, as well as children who have now attained majority and are unable to prove their nationality due to their childhood circumstances. Statelessness can arise among various categories of vulnerable children. Some children are orphaned when their parents die. Some parents simply abandon their children. This might be due to cultural practices; for example, in some ethnic groups children born in a certain birth order are said to bring bad luck and are abandoned. Disabled children are particularly vulnerable to being abandoned by their parents at various ages. Abandoned children and other children of unknown parents are highly unlikely to have their births registered. Given the lack of ties to a community and the inability to prove parentage, it is nearly impossible to legally establish the nationality of these children. Only a minority of abandoned children are cared for in orphanages. Many abandoned children are informally raised by communities, although seldom formally adopted in accordance with civil status procedures. Other children struggle as street children. Where no one can attest to a child’s date, place of birth, or parentage, it is impossible to obtain a jugement supplétif and to prove nationality. Various humanitarian actors and child protection social services have negotiated compromise solutions in some cases. For example, one NGO interviewed178 runs several children’s homes in Côte d’Ivoire. Each home seeks to develop personal relationships with local courts, which yields interim solutions. For example, one children’s home on the outskirts of Abidjan has obtained jugements supplétifs for children in its care, which either leaves blank or writes the name of the care providers in the home for the child’s parents; this same center has also obtained nationality certificates from these courts for some children. In another children’s home, the courts provide a jugement supplétif for the birth registration of the children, writing in the full name of the institution’s male director as their father, and selecting one of the center’s female staff as their mother – in both cases the nationality of the parents is indicated to be Ivorian. Another independent child services NGO operating in Abidjan has made arrangements with the local Guardianship Court to deliver a “provisional authorization of identity card,” that can be used as an identity document to help enroll the child in school.179 While these solutions meet some urgent child protection needs, they are not sustainable solutions for these children into adulthood as they involve side-stepping formal legal requirements and can therefore be called into question by national identification officials or courts in the future.180 Children’s social services agencies admit that such individuals likely face tremendous difficulties in obtaining identification documentation and are vulnerable to social exclusion. Once children reach majority, they ultimately fall outside of the intervention mandates of these agencies. No study has yet been conducted on the prevalence of statelessness among children in Côte d’Ivoire and the impact of such statelessness on the children concerned. 178 Interviews, Abidjan and outskirts, June-July 2014. Interview, Abidjan, June 2014. 180 Furthermore, some government agencies, for example the National Identification Office, can require that a certificate of nationality be obtained within a specific time period for various purposes. There is currently no database of nationality certificates that are issued, so should a person who has obtained one lose it, he or she would need to appear again de novo before a court with proof to obtain another one. The Ministry of Justice is currently considering ways to create a database of nationality certificates to overcome this issue. 179 49

Select target paragraph3