Official from the Civil Registration Organization says they do not have access to statistics on citizenship applicants for children of Iranian mothers

Afshar Khakbaz, Deputy of the Civil Registration Organization of Iran, referring to the law "Determining the Citizenship of Children Resulting from the Marriage of Iranian Women to Non-Iranian Men," states that they do not have access to the "number of applicants" but have so far issued identity documents for "29,045 children of foreign nationals with Iranian mothers who have obtained Iranian citizenship according to the law." He cites the law's article stating: "In the first step, the individual must apply for Iranian citizenship through the General Directorate of Foreign Nationals and Immigrants of the provincial governorates" and "if there are no security issues, they are accepted for Iranian citizenship." While countless children born from the marriage of Iranian mothers to non-Iranian men remain without birth certificates, the Secretary of the "National Child Rights Authority" recently attributed this to the "incomplete implementation" of the citizenship law and the "slow processing" of birth certificate issuance requests. Ali Kazemi, Secretary of the "National Child Rights Authority" affiliated with the Islamic Republic's Ministry of Justice, discussed the problems of the "non-implementation" of the law granting citizenship to children born from marriages of Iranian mothers to foreign fathers, stating that one of the main obstacles to issuing identity documents for these children is the slow process of issuing birth certificates and the "prolonged handling of these requests." The Secretary of the National Child Rights Authority noted that the law granting citizenship to children born from the marriage of Iranian women to non-Iranian men, passed in 2019, has "not yet been fully implemented." Previously, a number of representatives submitted a proposal to the Speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly to amend the law determining the citizenship of children resulting from marriages of Iranian women to foreign men. One of the issues raised by the supporting representatives of this "proposal" was the security concerns of the applicants. The incomplete implementation of the "Citizenship Law" has left thousands of children without birth certificates in a long queue, making it increasingly difficult to grant citizenship to children of Iranian mothers.