A/78/256 Declaration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Commonwe alth of Independent States Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. 9. The Human Rights Council has adopted a set of resolutions on nationality, including on the arbitrary deprivation of nationality (resolution 13/2), on the right to a nationality of women and children (resolution 20/4), on birth registration and the right of everyone to recognition everywhere as a person before the law (res olution 28/13) and on the right to a nationality with regard to women’s equal nationality rights in law and in practice (resolution 32/7). In July 2023, at its fifty-third session, the Human Rights Council adopted resolution 53/16, by which it urged States to reform nationality laws that discriminate against women and, where such laws had been reformed, to ensure their effective implementation. 10. In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the importance of the right to a nationality is acknowledged, as is the fact that gender equality in nationality laws is crucial to the realization of the 2030 Agenda. In particular, target 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals is aimed at providing legal identity for all, including birth registration, and target 17.19 is aimed at the strengthening of statistical capacities, including to ensure that countries achieve universal birth registration. B. Linkage between gender-discriminatory nationality laws and statelessness 11. Sex and gender-based discrimination contained in provisions of nationality laws is one of the major causes of statelessness, alongside State succession, military occupation, administrative barriers and gaps related to civil registration and other forms of discrimination in nationality laws and practices, such as with regard to ethnicity and religion. In many ways, discriminatory nationality laws and statelessness are mutually reinforcing, thereby resulting in a vicious circle. While systemic and historical discrimination is often at the root of statelessness, stateless persons face further discrimination and are deprived of basic rights owing to their lack of nationality. Although definitive or quantifiable data are limited, existing evidence suggests that gender-discriminatory nationality laws lead to statelessness. 9 12. Many States discriminate in the way that their laws provide for the acquisition, conferral, change and retention of nationality, including on grounds of sex and gender. Even where the law is not exclusionary, women and girls from minority groups may experience discrimination in practice when seeking to access nationality rights. For instance, women may be required to change their nationality upon marriage or at its dissolution, restricted or denied in their ability to pass on their nationality to their children or a spouse or prevented from registering the birth of their children or other vital statistics or gaining independent access to civil registration documents, including birth and marriage certificates, that are required to claim nationality rights. 13. According to UNHCR, discriminatory nationality laws can lead to statelessness whereby children cannot acquire nationality from their fathers, which can occur: (a) where the father is stateless; (b) where the laws of the father’s country do not permit conferral of nationality in certain circumstances, such as when the child is born abroad; (c) where a father is unknown or not married to the mother at the time of birth; (d) where a father has been unable to fulfil administrative steps to confer his __________________ 9 6/23 Radha Govil and Alice Edwards, “Women, nationality and statelessness: the problem of unequal rights”, in Nationality and Statelessness under International Law, Alice Edwards and Laura van Waas, eds. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 170. 23-14780