2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(1) of the ICCPR.2 Put differently, to protect the best interests of the child, states must ensure that the period during which a child’s nationality is undetermined, and for which the child’s other rights are suspended on the basis of undetermined nationality, does not exceed five years.3 We read this interpretation of art 24(3) as a welcome acknowledgement of the formative nature of childhood. Indeed, the Zhao decision has been qualified as a ‘victory for human rights’.4 Still, the HRC’s views in Zhao only begin to acknowledge the costs of being trapped in an administrative apparatus that operates without regard for the timescale of human life.5 The Zhao decision may be of immediate relevance to the ‘more than 13,000 children in the Netherlands facing a similar legal position, more than 5,000 of whom have been classed as “unknown” nationality for more than five years’.6 But children living in the territories of other ICCPR state parties might also benefit from this operationalisation of art 24(3), even where the conditions that enabled Zhao in the Netherlands are not in place. Within this commentary, we thus approach the decision from the perspective of our research and advocacy work in the Middle East and North Africa (‘MENA’) and consider the potential impact of this decision on ICCPR state parties in the MENA, where domestic legal protections for stateless persons are scarce. The constellation of factors that made the HRC’s ruling in Zhao possible are largely absent in the MENA. First, the case concerned a party to the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (‘Optional 2 3 4 5 6 This case concerns a child (Denny Zhao) born in the Netherlands in 2010 to a mother who was trafficked from China. Denny was registered as ‘of unknown nationality’ because his mother had never been registered in China, his father lacked parental rights and the Netherlands conveys nationality on the basis of descent. Further, proof of statelessness is required to register as ‘stateless’, but a procedure for determining statelessness did not exist. As a result, municipal authorities have often used the phrase ‘of unknown nationality’ when a newborn’s parent cannot demonstrate the newborn’s statelessness, but the parent’s lack of nationality is also not proven. Denny’s mother spent years attempting to obtain legal status for herself and child, and to document that neither of them was a Chinese national, eventually exhausting all legal remedies under Dutch law. The United Nations Human Rights Committee (‘HRC’) found that the Netherlands’ inaction and protracted application of the category ‘of unknown nationality’ violated the child’s rights under art 24(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted on 16 December 1966, 999 UNTS 171 (entered into force 23 March 1976) (‘ICCPR’). Given that, prior to the Zhao case, no HRC decision had dealt directly with states’ duties under ICCPR art 24(3), the HRC relied on sources outside its own jurisprudence, including United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) guidance on statelessness determination that highlighted the deficiencies of the Dutch substantive and procedural protections of a child’s right to access a nationality. See Zhao v Netherlands (n 1) 7 [8.3]. The HRC relied on UNHCR’s guidelines to suggest that a period of indeterminacy that exceeds five years violates a child’s best interests: 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, UN Doc HCR/GS/12/04 (21 December 2012) 6 [22]. Laura Bingham and Jelle Klaas, ‘A Victory for Human Rights in Zhao v the Netherlands (the “Denny Case”): Nationality from Birth, Without Exceptions’, European Network on Statelessness (Blog Post, 14 January 2021) <https://www.statelessness.eu/updates/ blog/victory-human-rights-zhao-v-netherlands-denny-case-nationality-birth-without>. See, eg, Ahmad Benswait, ‘Language and Statelessness: The Impact of Political Discourses on the Bidoon Community in Kuwait’ in Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey Kingston (eds), Statelessness, Governance and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press 2021) 87. ‘Zhao v Netherlands’, Open Society Justice Initiative (Web Page) <https://www.justiceinitiative.org/ litigation/zhao-v-netherlands>. 146