is unknown or stateless, the acquisition of nationality is only possible under limited circumstances as set out in article 4 of the Nationality Law (namely, the child must have been born outside Iraq; the child’s father must be either stateless or unknown; the application for the Iraqi nationality should occur within one year of reaching the age of maturity, unless owing to difficult circumstances; and the person should be residing in Iraq at the time of the application). The procedural requirements for demonstrating that the father is stateless are strict and may be difficult to fulfil in practice. Furthermore, the final decision is subject to the discretion of the Iraqi government: even if all legal requirements have been established to the satisfaction of the government, it retains the discretion power to deny applications for Iraqi nationality.4 4 Nevertheless, the retention of article 4 causes difficulties in the interpretation and application of this rule by explicitly authorising the Minister to consider granting nationality to a child born to an Iraqi mother outside Iraq, if the father is unknown or stateless. This language contradicts that of the preceding article which should allow all children of an Iraqi mother to acquire nationality as a matter of right, regardless of place of birth. In practice, female nationals can only confer their nationality to their children on an equal par to men if the child is born in the territory of Iraq. This discrimination is unjustified and is furthermore in violation of Article 14 of the Iraqi constitution that stipulates equality between men and women. Additionally it has been noted that the procedural requirements for proving that the father is stateless are strict and often highly difficult to fulfil. As there are a large number of Iraqi women in the Diaspora married to non-Iraqi men, this puts many children at risk of becoming stateless”; The Women’s Refugee Commission and Tilburg University Statelessness Programme, Briefing on Qatar, Iraq and Bahrain for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 57th Pre-Session Working Group, 29th July - 02 August 2013, http://bit.ly/2Ubl3of. The position of the competent Iraqi authority is determinative of the question whether the individual is an Iraqi national or not. Paras 38 and 44 of the UNHCR Statelessness Handbook explain that “the view of the competent authorities responsible for issuing identity documents that constitute proof of nationality” is “generally decisive” in situations of non-automatic nationality acquisition, namely when people go through an application procedure to request nationality; UNHCR, Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons under the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, 2014, https://www.refworld.org/docid/53b676aa4.html, paras 38, 44. 2