UNHCR, APRIL 2023 REFUGEES FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION or recognised on the basis of place of birth. Yet until recent years, birth registration rates were very low in all three countries covered by this report. Lack of birth registration means that neither the place of birth nor the legal connection between parent and child is legally recognised, as required by national laws and procedures to establish entitlement to nationality, whether base d on birth in the country or on descent. In the DRC, these procedures must be completed before reaching majority. While birth registration rates of refugees have greatly improved, there has been no effort to establish late birth registration for those born many years ago in Uganda or DRC; in Rwanda, however, UNHCR has been working with partners and respective government ministries to issue or reissue birth certificates to all refugees born in the country irrespective of their age. Even if the births of all children are registered, however, this is not sufficient to end statelessness. The laws of the country of origin of the parent may not automatically attribute nationality to a child born in another country. It is therefore problematic if birth certificates record the nationality of a child based on assumptions about the operation of the law of the country of nationality of one or both parents – especially, but not only, without sight of identity documents confirming nationality of the relevant parent. Civil status officials of the country of birth are not equipped with the knowledge and authority to determine the nationality of children born to foreign parents. For example, some national laws require that, for nationality to be acquired by a child, a foreign birth certificate must be formally transcribed into the civil registry of the country of origin through consular registration or other process. In case of the DRC, this must be done before a child attains majority. There is a lack of official guidance or common good practice on what information related to nationality should be recorded in the birth register and certificate in the case of the children of migrants or of refugees. Although the laws of all three countries provide for acquisition of nationality by children who are adopted by a national, formal adoption is rare among long-term refugees. Only Rwanda has procedures to establish legal recognition of a status less than adoption, where a child is being looked after by other families than their birth family. In other cases, the only recognition of such a relationship might be potential inclusion as part of a UNHCR registration document or other refugee registration “group”. The lack of legally recognised connection can create problems in any rights or benefits based on membership of a family, including (but not restricted to) recognition or acquisition of nationality, resettlement, or repatriation. In practice, it is likely that in event of voluntary repatriation to a country of origin other forms of evidence would be accepted than those strictly required by the law, including testimony of traditional leaders or other community members. This type of evidence is already relied upon for the enrolment of individuals into national population registers. It is, however, by no means guaranteed that all registered refugees would be recognised through such procedures. In West Africa, several hundreds of former Liberian refugees and their descendants, registered as Liberian with UNHCR and government authorities of the country of asylum, were not recognised by the Liberian authorities as Liberian citizens when their refugee status was ended, leaving them stateless. 86 The risk of non-recognition is obviously higher for those children born in exile who do not have direct knowledge of the country of origin, especially if they grew up separated from their biological parents, or their parents are now dead. The risks of statelessness are possibly highest, among the groups considered here, in relation to Kinyarwanda-speaking refugees who fled from DRC, whose status in DRC has been long contested, and some of who may well have been unrecognised as Congolese nationals even before they fled. The same would apply to members of some minority South Sudanese ethnic groups, especially those from border regions. These risks are disguised by the ongoing recognition of refugee status. But refugee status is precarious, since it is intended to be temporary, and may be ceased on various grounds. At the same time, however, formal recognition of stateless person status (through a statelessness determination 86 See discussion of the ‘red-coded’ Liberians in Bronwen Manby, ‘Migration, Nationality and Statelessness in West Africa’ (Geneva: UNHCR and IOM, 2015), https://www.refworld.org/docid/55b886154.html. 31