24 Romania’s international obligations as a state party to both the 1961 Convention and the ECN. In the other countries where ENS conducted research, this issue does not appear to arise, although in both Macedonia and Slovenia the law is somewhat ambiguous because the provisions dealing with the effects of adoption do not explicitly rule out loss of nationality leading to statelessness, but this seems to be a general administrative requirement for any withdrawal of nationality under the law.188 There may also still be some challenges in the country of the adoptive parents in securing a nationality for the child. It is important to keep in mind that the “sending” state in a situation of inter-country adoption may be a non-European one, so even if Europe’s nationality laws were all in alignment with international standards, children may be exposed to a (temporary) risk of statelessness during the adoption process. Earlier in 2015, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, picked up on this issue and recommended that Switzerland “accelerate the assessment procedure and ensure that a child adopted from abroad is not stateless or discriminated against during the waiting period between his or her arrival in the State party and formal adoption”.189 SURROGACY International child surrogacy is another challenging context in nationality terms. In short, the difficulty is: “ there is a risk of statelessness for a child, if the state of the surrogate mother’s nationality does not attribute that nationality to the child, and the state of the commissioning mother does not attribute its nationality because the commissioning mother did not give birth to the child. In some cases the child may be able to acquire the nationality of the husband or partner of the commissioning mother following the recognition of paternity, but this is not always the case”.190 In his speech at an international event on children and human rights law in July 2015, Thorbjørn Jagland, Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, commented how “developments in technology have also created major new challenges for the law”.191 Indeed, unlike with respect to other causes of childhood statelessness, international law has yet to regulate questions around the nationality rights of children born out of surrogacy.192 A Council of Europe Recommendation to states on the nationality of children, one of the only (soft law) standards to provide any guidance on this matter, is rather ambiguous in its demands since it seems to defer the question back to domestic law: “apply to children their provisions on acquisition of nationality by right of blood if, as a result of a birth conceived through medically assisted reproductive techniques, a child-parent family relationship is established or recognised by law”.193 However, regulatory solutions for nationality issues in surrogacy cases are largely absent across Europe194 and the matter is further complicated by the fact that surrogacy is prohibited in many domestic legal systems.195 Jagland went on to explain how the European Court of Human Rights has had to confront this challenge head on in a recent case. In the ruling he was referring to, Mennesson v. France,196 the crux of the case was the question whether France was obliged to recognise the familial ties between a French couple (commissioning parents) and their two children born in the US through a surrogate mother. Under French law, surrogacy is a method of assisted reproduction that is strictly prohibited and the government’s position was that to permit the registration of the commissioning couple as the parents of the child “would have been tantamount to tacitly accepting that domestic law could be circumvented knowingly and with impunity and would have jeopardised the consistent application of the provision outlawing surrogacy”.197 The Court said it could accept that France may wish to deter people from using prohibited methods of assisted reproduction. However, crucially: “ The effects of non-recognition in French law of the legal parent-child relationship between children thus conceived and the intended parents are not limited to the parents alone, who have chosen a particular method of assisted reproduction prohibited by the French authorities. They also affect the children themselves, whose right to respect for private life […] is substantially affected. Accordingly, a serious question arises as to the compatibility of that situation with the child’s best interests, respect for which must guide any decision in their regard”.198 Similar rulings have also been reached by the domestic courts in a number of countries, including Austria,199 the United Kingdom200 and Slovenia.201 Thus, even where domestic law does not regulate this question, states must nevertheless act in such a way as to ensure children’s right to a nationality, in line with the best interests of the child.