2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) Thus, even with universal birth registration, many children could be left with undetermined nationality and at risk of statelessness — and would remain so as adults without law and procedural reform to resolve their status. Among those who be at risk of statelessness without additional protections in law and practice are: • • • • • • • • • • Children of unknown parents and place of birth; Children separated from their parents, including trafficked children or orphans, who hold no copy of a birth certificate or any other documentation; Children who cannot acquire nationality from one of their parents, because of gender discrimination in the law (most often, preventing children born out of wedlock from acquiring nationality from their father, or born in wedlock from their mother); Children whose rights to nationality depend on the legal recognition of the parents’ marriage both in the state where the marriage took place and in the state of the child’s birth, and these documents cannot be produced or are not accepted as valid; Children of stateless parents; Children whose parents’ nationality is unknown or undocumented, or whose identity documents are out of date or rejected as fraudulently acquired; Children who cannot acquire the nationality of (one of) their parents, because of restrictions on transmission of nationality to those born outside their state(s) of origin; Children whose births were registered in the country of birth, but the registration was not transcribed as required, within the relevant timeframes, into the records of the consular or other relevant authorities of the state(s) of origin of the parents; Children born through the use of assisted reproductive technologies, including international surrogacy arrangements; and Children who cannot acquire a nationality from one of their parents, and who can only acquire the nationality of the state of birth on reaching majority. In all these cases, ensuring that a child has the right to acquire a nationality will require legal reform and administrative procedures to implement that right in practice. Effective legal protection against statelessness in practice almost always involves providing general legal rights to acquire nationality based on birth and/or residence in a country, given the difficulties of proving statelessness of the child or parent. Efforts to register a child — or adult — with another form of legal status (including the status of stateless person), and a document to match, may be helpful as an interim measure over the short term. But history shows that sometimes such interim measures become permanent, serving to identify as outsiders a group of non-citizens who have no meaningful connection to any other country than the one in which they were born and live. It seems that there are no short cuts to the legal and political processes required to determine nationality and end statelessness. If an identity other than that of ‘resident’ is to be registered, both private and public international law must be mobilised to help resolve these uncertainties — ideally at the time of birth, but later if that is not done. A name, birth registration, the recognition of family 270