Birth Registration - Fundamental for Nationality & Rights

A nurse records the footprint of a newborn on a chart in the maternity ward of the Union hospital, Beijing. Peoples Republic of China.

The right to a name and nationality is well established. However, around 50 million births go unregistered every year in developing countries. These unregistered children are almost always from poor, marginalized or displaced families or from countries where systems of registration are not in place or functional.

South Asia has the largest number of unregistered children, with approximately 24 million births not registered in 2005. This value corresponds to 64 per cent of total annual births in the region or over 47 per cent of the unregistered births in developing countries. Sub-Saharan Africa has around 18 million unregistered children, representing more than 60 per cent of births.

Apart from being the first legal acknowledgement of a child's existence, registration of births is fundamental to the realization of a number of rights and a number of practical needs including:

Providing access to healthcare -- more than 30 countries require birth registration before a child can be treated in a health centre.
Providing access to immunization. In at least 20 countries children cannot be legally immunized without proof of birth.
Ensuring that children enrol in school at the right age.
Enforcing laws relating to minimum age for employment, assisting efforts to prevent child labour.
Effectively countering forced marriage of young girls before they are legally eligible, without proof of age.
Protecting young people from underage military service or conscription.
Protecting children from harassment by police and other law enforcement officers.
Securing the child's right to a nationality, at the time of birth or at a later stage.
Protecting children who are trafficked, including through repatriation and family reunion.
Getting a passport, opening a bank account, obtaining credit, voting or finding employment.

Most countries have a legal provision for registering births of children within a prescribed period. However, often these laws are not comprehensive enough, are not enforced or do not function. There are also practical problems, including births which take place in isolated rural locations, or births away from medical facilities, which are the places where birth registration normally takes place.

Sometimes there may be a deliberate lack of birth registration, with particular groups excluded. Discriminatory policies intended to minimize the official size of ethnic minorities directly affect the provision of assistance to immigrants. Groups who have been denied the right of birth registration include children of Roma in Central and Eastern Europe, Kurds living in Syria, Tatars in Ukraine and Russians in Estonia and Latvia.