European States’ Obligations to Repatriate the Children Detained in Camps in Northeast Syria is particularly acute when the child is too young to provide information about their origins. Some of the children born abroad, on the other hand, are “unregistered children” who have failed to acquire a nationality because they cannot be registered in the camps, which, as mentioned above, is a condition for the State’s recognition of nationality. Therefore, children detained in the camps who were born in Syria face a particular risk of becoming stateless226 due to barriers to acquiring the nationality of European countries as well as to accessing birth registration and nationality in Syria. 227 Furthermore, almost all children in the camps, including those who have acquired nationality either earlier in their country of origin or automatically by birth abroad, are currently having difficulties proving or establishing their nationality,228 because they lack official identity documents (passports, ID cards, birth certificates etc.), or they only have the documents issued by ISIS authorities, which are not recognized. 229 Thus, most children in the camps are at risk of not being able to prove they have acquired nationality waiting for family tracing and reunification. See: ICG, “Women and Children First: Repatriating the Westerners Affiliated with ISIS”, Middle East Report No 208, 18 November 2019, pp. 8-9. 226 The Equal Rights Trust, “Chapter 2: Critiquing the Categorisation of the Stateless”, in Unravelling Anomaly Detention, Discrimination and the Protection Needs of Stateless Persons, July 2010, p. 56. 227 Also note most of the children born in Syria cannot acquire the Syrian nationality either. Syrian nationality law adopts the principle of jus sanguinis, which holds that nationality is determined solely by the parent’s nationality and the place of birth is irrelevant. Therefore, the law does not grant nationality to children born in Syria, unless their father is a Syrian national, except in some specific circumstances, such as when a child is born to a Syrian mother and whose family relationship to his/her father has not yet been established, when a child is born in Syria to unknown parents or to parents whose nationality is unknown, or when a child is born in Syria and was not, at the time of birth, entitled to acquire a foreign nationality by virtue of his parentage. Moreover, in Syria, the safeguards against statelessness under Syrian nationality law are not systematically implemented and the existing provision only applies to children born in Syria with unknown parentage and does not include children who were born in European countries or who, at the time of birth, were entitled to acquire a foreign nationality by virtue of their parentage. See: Syrian Nationality, “Nationality, Documentation, and Statelessness in Syria”; Article 3 of “Legislative Decree 276 - Nationality Law”, Syrian Arab Republic, Legislative Decree 276, 24 November 1969. In any case, the burden of proof should lie with the State to establish that an individual will not be rendered stateless and that loss or deprivation can therefore proceed. Also see: UNHCR, “Expert Meeting on Interpreting Articles 5-9 of the 1961 Statelessness Convention and Preventing Statelessness Resulting from Loss and Deprivation of Nationality”, Tunis, 31 October–1 November 2013. 228 “[…] they will have difficulty proving their Dutch nationality. In order to return by their own means, they will need a passport. To be considered for a passport, the child will have to prove that he or she is Dutch. […] strictly speaking it is not impossible that those children born in Syria, Turkey and Iraq may be able to prove their nationality. However, without assistance from the Dutch authorities in supplying proof, reporting to consular services (in the surrounding countries), as far as that is in itself possible, does not seem to be worthwhile.” See: Chrisje Sandelowsky-Bosman and Ton Liefaard “Children Trapped in Camps in Syria, Iraq and Turkey: Reflections on Jurisdiction and State Obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child”, Nordic Journal of Human Rights, Volume 38, Issue 2, 2020, p. 146. 229 UN, “Key Principles for the Protection, Repatriation, Prosecution, Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Women and Children with Links to United Nations listed Terrorist Groups”, April 2019, p. 3. 42