Statelessness Working Paper Series 2017/04 civil servants to correctly implement the safeguard against statelessness at birth, and the lack of consistency in their practice. Bad practices identified were the tendency to register the child as having undetermined nationality, or to request mandatory documents, such as a statelessness judgment for the parents or the child. The survey confirmed identified obstacles to acquisition of nationality, such as ensuring paternal filiation, the division of competence between the authorities responsible for the birth registration and those responsible for the registers in which children of asylum seekers’ are registered, or birth registration for children of parents in irregular stay. It also underlined that children of migrants in irregular stay are the least likely to benefit from the safeguard against statelessness at birth due to the lack of a legal residence of their parents. A welcome observation was, however, the initiative of some municipalities to turn to the FPS Justice to help them determine the statelessness of the child. This article has shown that— despite strong existing safeguards against statelessness at birth in the Belgian legislation— in practice, proper application of existing safeguards is impaired by administrative obstacles or lack of expertise of civil servants who implement the law, which leave the children of asylum seekers at risk of statelessness. The identification of children at risk of statelessness or the assessment a child's statelessness is a difficult task for civil servants, who are not trained on the issue. Therefore, training for civil servants on Article 10 BNC, the development of a centralised body that could systematically help them assess children's statelessness and the issuance of guidelines for municipalities on persons at risk of statelessness would be a welcome development to ensure the correct implementation of Article 10 BNC. 18