Ms Julie Ahern:

We could build into the best interest assessments, if we were to bring them into legislation, the risk of statelessness as being one of the key considerations and try to create a regime where those assessments could be done very quickly. It does not necessarily have to be a long, protracted process. Strict regulation could be put in place stating when and how quickly assessments would be carried out and one of the factors could be the risk of statelessness. The reality is children will continue to be born through international surrogacy, parents will continue to come back and we need to make sure children have appropriate legal links to their parents.