76 C. Dumbrava In 2007 Ikufumi and Yuki, a married Japanese couple, travelled to India and hired Mehta as surrogate mother for their planned child.7 Using Ikufumi’s sperm and an egg from an anonymous donor, the Indian doctors obtained an embryo, which they then implanted in Mehta’s womb. Only one month before the birth of Manji, the resulting child, Ikufumi and Yuki divorced. When Ikufumi attempted to procure a Japanese passport for Manji, the Japanese authorities refused on grounds that Manji was not Japanese. According to the Japanese Civil Code, the mother is always the woman who gives birth to the child. Despite having three ‘mothers’ – a genetic mother, who contributed with the egg, an intended mother who later declined involvement, and a surrogate mother, who did not plan to take up parental responsibilities – Manji had no obvious legal mother. Indeed, Manji’s Indian birth certificate mentioned Ikufumi as the father but left the rubric concerning ‘the mother’ blank. After much legal wrangling Manji was issued a certificate of identity stating that she was stateless, with which Ikufumi managed to take her to Japan. These are just two of a growing number of cases that test the legal and normative linkage between human reproduction, legal parentage and citizenship. Not only do they question conventional assumptions about the biological and cultural basis of citizenship, but they also show the limits of the principle of ius sanguinis in ensuring the adequate determination of citizenship status. The incongruity between reproduction, legal parentage and citizenship is not an issue triggered solely by advances in reproductive technologies. Traditionally, children born out of wedlock could not acquire the father’s citizenship through descent. Many countries still maintain special procedures for the acquisition of citizenship by children born out of wedlock to a foreign mother and a citizen father. In most cases this implies submitting a request for citizenship after parentage is legally established, although in Denmark these children can acquire citizenship only if the parents marry. In the Czech Republic and the Netherlands (for children older than 7), the determination of parentage for the purpose of citizenship attribution requires showing evidence of a genetic relationship between the father and the child. As argued by the European Court of Human Rights in its 2010 judgment on 7 Points, K. (undated), Commercial surrogacy and fertility tourism in India: The case of Baby Manji. Durham: The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, available at https://web.duke.edu/kenanethics/CaseStudies/ BabyManji.pdf