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The 2019 UPR noted that Cyprus has been known to deny registration and Cypriot nationality even when the child has one Cypriot parent, on the basis of the foreign parent’s ethnicity, gender, place of residence, or means of entering the country. In 2022, Cyprus received a recommendation from the CRC to facilitate acquisition of nationality for children who would otherwise be stateless, regardless of their parents’ citizenship, residence, legal or marital status, with particular attention given to children born to refugee, asylum-seeking, migrant or stateless parents. Cyprus received multiple similar recommendations from the 2024 UPR.
In Georgia, lax surrogacy laws have made the country attractive to foreign couples looking to ‘commission’ children. This practice has been critiqued as being exploitative of low income women, local or foreign, who serve as gestational carriers. In Georgia, legal consent from surrogate mothers used to not be required. Surrogate mothers are not listed on birth certificates. This poses obstacles for children born through surrogacy being able to access information about their origins. In 2024, the CRC recommended Georgia strengthen its efforts to ensure children born through surrogacy can access information about their origins.
Iraq reformed its Constitution in 2005 and nationality law in 2006 to allow Iraqi women the equal right to confer nationality on their children born inside the country. However, children born outside the country could only obtain citizenship from their father. Iraq’s new nationality law acknowledged the mother’s right to confer nationality only when the father was unknown or stateless. However, strict procedural requirements made it practically impossible to prove that the father was stateless. There are a high number of Iraqi women married to non-Iraqi men living in the diaspora, plus an estimated one million Iraqi refugees who were living in Syria, which placed many children at risk of statelessness.
In Syria, Palestinian refugees experience intergenerational transference of statelessness through the birth registration process. Most states in the region have never offered them a pathway to acquiring nationality, as a means of supporting the Palestinian cause and eventual right to return. Prior to the 2011 outbreak of the civil war, over 550,000 Palestinian refugees living in Syria were de jure stateless. The conflict in Syria led many thousands to abandon the country and seek international protection. Exclusion from citizenship added to the vulnerability of Palestinians fleeing from Syria. Since many hold UNRWA-issued IDs or Syrian travel documents only, they routinely have had their country of origin and status registered incorrectly by authorities in host countries (either as Syrian or of unknown nationality). Palestinians’ precarious status within Syria is compounded when doubly displaced, placing birth registration for newborns even further out of reach.
In Namibia, women determined not to be ‘ordinarily resident,’ namely Angolan women, are currently issued extra-legal foreigner birth certificates for their children by registrars, despite having no legal authority to do so. This is due to discriminatory fears of enfranchising those viewed as ‘other’. These documents leave the child with a ‘dead end document’ and without citizenship.
In 2012, the CRC recommended that Azerbaijan undertake all necessary measures to ensure the availability of universal birth registration for all children regardless of the circumstance of birth, and/or the marital and/or migration status of the child’s parent(s). According to a 2021 NGO report to the CRC, in Azerbaijan many children conceived by illegal child marriages are registered as extramarital or ‘illegitimate’. There is significant social stigma in Azerbaijan to having a child outside of wedlock. ‘Illegitimate’ children and their mothers can face significant ridicule and harsh treatment.
In 2019, CEDAW expressed concerns around Roma, refugee, and asylum seeking women’s lack of access to reproductive healthcare in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as well as undocumented mothers’ lack of access to birth registration for their children. CEDAW recommended addressing the special needs of these groups, including providing delivery and postnatal care in reception centers and giving free legal aid in accessing birth registration to migrant and socially disadvantaged women and girls. The government of BiH raised concerns in 2019 about Roma women without identity documentation or health insurance crossing the border to give birth.
During China’s one child policy from 1979-2015, unauthorized births were impossible to register without a heavy fine. During that time, birth permission was required to be presented when registering a child. Over half of unregistered births in China were those born violating the family planning policy. This deterred parents from registering unauthorized births, especially the births of girls. Additionally, many births of girls were concealed by local officials and rural families.This enabled career advancement for local officials charged with enforcing the policy, and larger family sizes for rural farming families reliant on their labour. Only in 2021 did the Chinese government shift the policy to allow families to have up to three children and eliminate the fines.
The 2019 UPR noted that Cyprus has been known to deny registration and Cypriot nationality even when the child has one Cypriot parent, on the basis of the foreign parent’s ethnicity, gender, place of residence, or means of entering the country. In 2022, Cyprus received a recommendation from the CRC to facilitate acquisition of nationality for children who would otherwise be stateless, regardless of their parents’ citizenship, residence, legal or marital status, with particular attention given to children born to refugee, asylum-seeking, migrant or stateless parents. Cyprus received multiple similar recommendations from the 2024 UPR.
In Georgia, lax surrogacy laws have made the country attractive to foreign couples looking to ‘commission’ children. This practice has been critiqued as being exploitative of low income women, local or foreign, who serve as gestational carriers. In Georgia, legal consent from surrogate mothers used to not be required. Surrogate mothers are not listed on birth certificates. This poses obstacles for children born through surrogacy being able to access information about their origins. In 2024, the CRC recommended Georgia strengthen its efforts to ensure children born through surrogacy can access information about their origins.
Before 2019 children of undocumented migrants and stateless persons in Kazakhstan could not be registered at birth. This particularly impacted children born outside medical institutions to undocumented mothers.
In 2018, CEDAW noted the barriers Roma women face in North Macedonia in regards to accessing identity documents, and the high risk of statelessness for Roma children. While some measures had been taken to promote birth registration, CEDAW recommended that the country ensure equal access to identity documentation and create faster and less expensive legal measures for issuance of identity documents. Roma women and girls lack of access to identity documents and high risk of statelessness leads to their exclusion from education and puts them at higher risk of experiencing gender based violence, trafficking, and exploitation. In 2022, the CRC recommended making birth registration free, and to ensure citizenship for children in the country who would be stateless.
In 2017, CEDAW reported that Norway lacks a statelessness determination procedure and a regime for the protection of stateless persons. Children born in Norway to stateless women, including women asylum-seekers and refugees, may therefore become stateless. CEDAW recommended that Norway amend its nationality laws to allow for dual citizenship to reduce the risk that foreign spouses become stateless or lose custody of their Norwegian-born children should their marriage to a Norwegian spouse dissolve. Official instructions for birth registration for non-Nordic parents of different nationalities say to record the nationality of the mother in the birth notification. However, children whose mother originates from a country where matrilineal conferral of citizenship is not possible and whose fathers are unable or unwilling to confer citizenship are at risk of statelessness.
In Oman, in the 2000s the children of Omani women who were married to non-Omanis were immediately understood to be foreigners based on the country’s nationality laws. Children of mixed nationality parents had precarious access to residency, citizenship, higher education, property inheritance, and most egregiously, were made to leave the country at age 18. Some mothers would resort to extreme measures to secure residency permits for spouses and children. Such practices could lead to exploitation and extortion from private employers. Additionally, Oman has free healthcare for citizens, but women who gave birth in hospitals to children with a foreigner father were forced to pay expensive medical bills.
In 2019, CEDAW expressed concerns around Roma, refugee, and asylum seeking women’s lack of access to reproductive healthcare in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as well as undocumented mothers’ lack of access to birth registration for their children. CEDAW recommended addressing the special needs of these groups, including providing delivery and postnatal care in reception centers and giving free legal aid in accessing birth registration to migrant and socially disadvantaged women and girls. The government of BiH raised concerns in 2019 about Roma women without identity documentation or health insurance crossing the border to give birth.
The 2019 UPR noted that Cyprus has been known to deny registration and Cypriot nationality even when the child has one Cypriot parent, on the basis of the foreign parent’s ethnicity, gender, place of residence, or means of entering the country. In 2022, Cyprus received a recommendation from the CRC to facilitate acquisition of nationality for children who would otherwise be stateless, regardless of their parents’ citizenship, residence, legal or marital status, with particular attention given to children born to refugee, asylum-seeking, migrant or stateless parents. Cyprus received multiple similar recommendations from the 2024 UPR.