Children and Their Parents: A Comparative Study of the Legal Position of Children with Regard to Their Intentional and Biological Parents in English and Dutch Law

This is a book about children and their parents. There are many different kinds of children and at least about as many different kinds of parents. In addition to the many different disciplines that study children and their parents, such as sociology, psychology, child studies and gender studies, to name but a few, this study concerns a legal question with regard to the parent-child relationship, namely how the law assigns parents to children. This subject is approached in a comparative legal perspective and covers England and The Netherlands. The book contains a detailed comparison and analysis of the manner in which the law in the two jurisdictions assigns the status of legal parent and/or attributes parental responsibility to the child’s biological and intentional parents. The concept ‘procreational responsibility’, which is introduced in the concluding chapter of the book, may be used as a tool to assess and reform existing regulations on legal parent-child relationships. The structure of the book, which is based on a categorisation of different family types in a ‘family tree’, enables the reader to have easy access to family-specific information.FdR – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

Statelessness Determination in the Netherlands

The Netherlands lacks an adequate mechanism for the identification of stateless persons, and is therefore not complying with its international obligations in the field of statelessness. Contrary to the position of the Dutch government, the existing procedures that stateless persons can appeal to are not in conformity with the relevant international standards. This paper contains a detailed analysis of the two procedures which have been invoked by the Dutch government in defence of the current statelessness protection and identification regime in the Netherlands, namely the registration of individuals in population registers, and the procedure for obtaining the so-called ‘no-fault’ residence permit. It illustrates that neither of the two are effective alternatives for statelessness determination. In addition, recent legislative changes that might affect the registration of statelessness in the Netherlands are discussed, and a proposal put forward by the UNHCR for a determination procedure in courts is evaluated