‘Legal Identity for All’ and Statelessness The legal identity field is vastly complicated by these sensitivities and differences of legal approach. It can be difficult enough to manage legal and cultural pluralism within the registration systems of one country. When state boundaries are crossed, the challenges are multiplied. The recognition of civil status documents issued by one set of authorities in other countries is managed by national rules that are as varied as the rules for civil registration itself. Depending on the country, an assortment of official copies of parental birth, death or marriage certificates may be required to register a child’s birth. If the child’s birth is in a different country from the one where these documents were issued, the official copies must be obtained from the country of origin, presented in a form accepted by the host country and usually transcribed into its national records. Non-recognition of a foreign-registered civil status event means that it lacks legal effect, leaving (for example) marriages invalid in one country or the other, or still in place despite a registered divorce. If a person’s civil status documents are not recognised in another jurisdiction, the rights that depend on these documents may also be unrecognised: the same child may therefore be born in wedlock for the authorities of one country and out-of-wedlock for another. 49 On top of these challenges related to registration in the country of birth, consular registration and/or transcription into the records of the state of origin is in many cases necessary if the child’s right to the nationality of one or both parents is to be recognised. It is also likely that the parents will need a valid passport or other identity document, and if neither is a national of the country where their child is born, often also a visa showing legal presence in the country. 50 A finding of an error at any stage in these processes can sometimes result in the retroactive loss of nationality apparently held legitimately over many years. 51 Already exhausting for legal migrants in the formal sector, for refugees and irregular migrants of few resources (financial or social) these games of paperchase make the recognition of legal identity and nationality ever more fragile. 52 These problems of conflicts of law place us in the domain of The Hague Conference of Private International Law (‘The Hague Conference’), an 85member international organisation established in 1955 with the objective ‘to work for the progressive unification of the rules of private international law’. 53 The Hague Conference has undertaken some efforts to simplify the mutual recognition 49 50 51 52 53 In a case before the United Kingdom courts, an applicant was left stateless when Mauritius did not accept that she was her father’s legitimate daughter on the basis of the documents produced; while the UK did, which meant that she had not retained British citizenship when Mauritius became independent: R v Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex p Mahaboob Bibi [1985] Imm AR 134, affirmed by the Court of Appeal at [1987] Imm AR 340, discussed in Laurie Fransman, Adrian Berry and Alison Harvey, Fransman’s British Nationality Law (3rd edn, Bloomsbury Professional 2011) ch 8.12. Bronwen Manby, Preventing Statelessness among Migrants and Refugees: Birth Registration and Consular Assistance in Egypt and Morocco (LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series No 27, 2019). Gerard-René de Groot and Patrick Wautelet, Reflections on Quasi-Loss of Nationality in Comparative, International and European Perspective (CEPS Papers in Liberty and Security in Europe No 66, Centre for European Policy Studies August 2014) <https://www.ceps.eu/ceps-publications/reflections-quasi-loss-nationality-comparativeinternational-and-european-perspective/>. Pardis Mahdavi, Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives (Stanford University Press 2016); Catherine Allerton, ‘Impossible Children: Illegality and Excluded Belonging among Children of Migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia’ (2018) 44(7) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 1081. Statute of The Hague Conference on Private International Law (The Hague Conference on Private International Law, entered into force 19 July 1955) art 1. 257