6 Refugee Law Initiative Working Paper 76 on Human Rights (ECHR), or other international treaties, an increasing number of child rights cases have gone before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR),18 the Court of Justice of the European Union, and other international adjudicative bodies, although most are litigated before European states’ domestic courts. This paper considers both national and international venues. In the context of litigation involving childhood statelessness, this paper questions what correlations exist between certain elements of litigation such as jurisdiction, litigant choice, evidence of child participation, court rules, law relied upon, and the outcome of those cases. In Europe, statelessness “affects over half a million people”, many of whom are children.19 Reasons underlying this crisis include “complexities of conflicts in nationality laws, state succession, forced displacement, historical and contemporary migration, structural birth registration problems, access to nationality and related administrative practices.”20 Over 6 million children do not hold citizenship of their country of residence in the EU, and in January 2022, the number of stateless and non-EU citizen children was more than twice the number of EU citizen children.21 Due to the nature of statelessness, no exact total can be assigned to the number of stateless children; however, this problem is evidenced in part through the court cases brought year after year. How these children are allowed to navigate the legal system to seek an end to their statelessness is dependent upon several factors. 2.1.1 Litigant Roles There are well-established components of litigation regardless of subject matter, ranging from venue to litigant choice to legal strategy to potential third-party involvement. Regarding choice of litigant, in most cases concerning children, the child neither conceives of nor controls the decision to file a complaint or application before a judicial or administrative body. Parents, attorneys, international agencies, NGOs, legal clinics, or legal aid instead may take the lead. The dependence upon adults to assist children “in accessing justice where their rights have been violated” seems inescapable.22 Unfortunately, that very reliance on others often hinders children from “playing a direct role in legal proceedings.”23 This role assignment is of “key” importance for any type of strategic litigation,24 and the decisions surrounding these roles carry significant weight when children are involved. Common litigant scenarios may present the child as the sole litigant (with an adult representative), or the child as co-litigant with a parent or other similarly-situated applicants, or the child’s rights may be represented by an interested third party such as an NGO. Children often are viewed as “ideal sympathetic clients” and thus might be considered by some to be model primary litigants.25 At times, litigators even select a child to represent a specific community as the “face of the case.”26 Questions may surround the level of choice exercised by these children to step into these given roles. As a result, sometimes those involved with child rights litigation are accused of “instrumentalizing and tokenizing” child applicants.27 With respect to child/parent co-litigants, the combination of a well-meaning parent and child may be perceived as a natural, safe strategy. One might presume a child’s and parents’ rights, needs, and goals are the Unaccompanied Asylum-Seekers in Kent from 2006 to 2013, and How “Corrective Remedies” Have Failed Them (2014) 28 Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law 123. 18 Claire Fenton-Glynn, ‘Children, parents and the European Court of Human Rights’ (2019) 6 European Human Rights Law Review 643. 19 European Network on Statelessness (ENS), ‘Litigation Toolkit on Statelessness for Legal Practitioners, (7 June 2024), Vol II, 2 <https:// www.statelessness.eu/updates/publications/litigation-toolkit-statelessness-legal-practitioners> accessed 11 March 2025. 20 European Committee on Legal Co-operation, ‘Statelessness and access to nationality’ (2025) <https://www.coe.int/en/web/cdcj/statelessness-and-access-to-nationality> accessed 31 March 2025. 21 Eurostat, ‘Children in migration – demography and migration’ (14 June 2024) <https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Children_in_migration_-_demography_and_migration> accessed 12 March 2025. 22 Child Rights International Network (CRIN), ‘CRC in Court: The Case Law of the Convention on the Rights of the Child’ (2012), p. 28 <https://archive.crin.org/docs/CRC_in_Court_Report.pdf> accessed 11 March 2025 23 Aoife Nolan and Ann Skelton, ‘“Turning the Rights Lens Inwards”: The Case for Child Rights-Consistent Strategic Litigation Practice’ (2022) 22 HRL Rev 1, 14. 24 Amnesty (n 9) para. 21. 25 Weiss (n 17) Step 3. 26 Ramsden and Gledhill (n 7) 412. 27 Donger (n 12) 285. See also Stephanie Rap, ‘“A Test that is about Your Life”: The Involvement of Refugee Children in Asylum Application Proceedings in the Netherlands’ (2022) 41 Refugee Survey Quarterly 298.