CEDAW/C/81/D/68/2014 of the Optional Protocol from considering the complain ant’s allegations regarding violations of his and his children’s rights. 17.8 Having found no impediment to the admissibility of the communication, the Committee proceeds to its consideration of the merits. Consideration of the merits 18.1 The Committee has considered the present communication in the light of all the information made available to it by the author and by the State party, as provided for in article 7 (1) of the Optional Protocol. Article 1 18.2 The author alleges that the State party discriminated against him and his children, as the grandchild and great-grandchildren of a woman subjected to differential treatment on the basis of her gender. The author considers that that constitutes discrimination, due to their indigenous status being based on their maternal indigenous lineage and not on a paternal indigenous lineage. The author maintains that the ongoing discrimination under the Indian Act has plagued his maternal indigenous bloodline since 1927, allowing four generations to be exposed to gender-based discrimination and violating his and his children’s fundamental rights to belong to an indigenous people and to transmit their cultural identity according to their own traditional practices. The State party argues that the sex -based distinction between maternal and paternal lines has been removed with the amendments of 2019 and that great-grandchildren from a maternal line have an equal opportunity for Indian status as do great-grandchildren of a paternal line with the same birth and marri age dates. The State party indicates that, in 2019, the author was registered with status under paragraph 6 (1) (a.3) and his children are entitled to registration under section 6 (2), because of a differential treatment that they receive on the basis of the date of the adoption of a new legislative scheme governing entitlement to registration, which no longer constitutes gender-based discrimination under article 1 of the Convention. It also submits that, at its core, the communication concerns the criteria for the determination of who is eligible to be registered as an Indian, indicating that the legislation seeks to ensure that those who are eligible for Indian status have a sufficient degree of descent from the historical First Nations peoples. According to the State party, there is no human right to be registered as indigenous. 18.3 The Committee observes that, because the author is a disenfranchised matrilineal indigenous descendant, he was denied status as indigenous and the right to fully determine his own identity until 2011, when he could recover only limited status, being then unable to pass on his cultural identity to his children. Only in 2019 – owing to his grandmother’s posthumously adjusted registration under new paragraph 6 (1) (a.1) – could the author’s status be upgraded from registration under section 6 (2) to registration under paragraph 6 (1) (a.3). As a consequence, the author’s children were recognized as indigenous under status 6 (2) only, which still does not give them the right to freely pass on their indigenous status to their children. The Committee observes that the cut-off rules are unilaterally established by the State party and currently apply only to descendants of indigenous women who previously lost their indigenous status and the right to determine their own identity, resulting in differentiation in status in comparison with descendants of indigenous men; the cut off rules are therefore precisely what is affecting the author and his children, whose indigenous status comes from their maternal and not paternal lineage. Indeed, the Committee also observes that the amendments of 2011 allowed the grandchildren of disenfranchised women to regain eligibility, provided that they were born after 1951, and only under a limited status that made their ability to pass on status to their own children dependent on the status of the other parent. The Committee further observes 22-03658 15/19