Birth Registration and Consular Assistance in Egypt and Morocco 11 Legal and Policy Framework International Law The right of every person to a nationality14 has been part of international human rights law since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.15 However, the question of which particular state has the obligation to recognise the nationality of any child or adult is a vexed one. The basic principle of international law remains the rule established by the Hague Convention of 1930 that it is for each state to determine who are its nationals.16 Some limits on state discretion have been set, including the rule recognised by the Hague Convention that children of unknown parents found in a country (‘foundlings’) should be presumed to be nationals; and the protection, less widely accepted but established by both the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and the 1990 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, that a child who is otherwise stateless shall acquire the nationality of the state where he or she is born.17 Gender discrimination in transmission of nationality to children is prohibited by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and increasingly rare.18 But there is no general requirement in international law to recognise birth in a territory as a basis for acquisition of nationality, nor to recognise the nationality of children born to nationals outside the country of the parent’s nationality, especially over many generations. The right to birth registration is protected by the same treaties, and there is extensive guidance from UNICEF and others on the importance of this protection and the steps to achieve universal coverage.19 International law also protects the right of every person to recognition as a person before the law, regardless of the documents held or immigration This paper uses ‘nationality’ and ‘citizenship’ as synonyms. Nationality is the term most often used in international law, while different national legal systems vary in their usage of (the equivalents of ) either term. 15 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 15; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 24(3); Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 7. These obligations are also provided for in the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, Article 6; and were supported by the Arab Declaration on Belonging and Legal Identity, adopted by ministers of the League of Arab States, 28 February 2018. 16 Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws, 1930; see Paul Weis, Nationality and Statelessness in International Law, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1979); Ruth Donner, The Regulation of Nationality in International Law (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Transnational Publishers Inc., 1994); René de Groot and Olivier W Vonk, International Standards on Nationality Law: Texts, Cases and Materials (Oisterwijk, The Netherlands: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2015). 17 UNHCR, ‘Guidelines on Statelessness No. 4: Ensuring Every Child’s Right to Acquire a Nationality through Articles 1-4 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness’, December 2012, available at https://www.refworld.org/docid/50d460c72.html; ACERWC, ‘General Comment on Article 6: Name and nationality’, April 2014, available at https://acerwc.africa/general-comments/ 18 UNHCR, ‘Background Note on Gender Equality, Nationality Laws and Statelessness’, 2019. 19 UNICEF, ‘Every Child’s Birth Right: Inequities and Trends in Birth Registration’, December 2013; UNICEF, ‘A Passport to Protection: A Guide to Birth Registration Programming’, December 2013; UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Statistics Division, ‘Principles and Recommendations for a Vital Statistics System (Revision 3)’, 2014. 14