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CHINA - LAWYERS CALL TO CURB PRACTICE OF LINKING HUKOU OFFICIAL BIRTH REGISTRATION TO NATIONAL FAMILY PLANNING LAW PERMISSION

By Wei Mingyan - Editor: Sophia Zhu – April 30, 2014

Thirty two lawyers and scholars have recently called for local governments to curb the informal practice of linking the hukou, or household registration system, to the family planning policy.[chinanews.cn]

Thirty-two lawyers and scholars have recently called for local governments to curb the informal practice of linking the hukou, or household registration system, to the family planning policy.

Lawyer Wu Youshui from east China's Zhejiang Province sent a letter to the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee and the State Council, in which she urged them to consider curbing the informal practice of using birth permission as the premise for   registering a newborn's hukou. Birth permission is given to parents before pregnancy and is used to make sure parents have obeyed the national family planning law, that is, in many cases, parents need to prove that this is their only child.

In April, east China's Shandong Province and Nanchang City in east China's Jiangxi Province passed a law which clearly states that newborns will be registered with the hukou system as long as their parents present a birth certificate from a hospital, which means, they no longer need to provide the birth permission certificate to prove they have obeyed the family planning law in China.

According to the Sixth National Census in 2010, there were 13 million people in China who were not registered in the hukou system, which means they will face great difficulties in education, career and other aspects of life. The reason these people don't have a hukou is that their parents either didn't have birth permissions (usually because they had more than one child) or they couldn't afford the fine levied for breaking the national family planning law.

According to lawyer Huang Yizhi from Beijing, asking parents to provide their birth permission certificate in order to register a hukou has never been legal. "Our existing legal system has never specifically stated that children born outside of the family planning law cannot or should not be registered with a hukou. They need to pay a fine for having more than one child, but not being able to register their child for a hukou is not one of the punishments," said Huang.

In 1988, National Family Planning Committee issued a notice to clearly forbid linking hukou registration with breaching the family planning law. The Ministry of Public Security also issued the same notice in both 1998 and 2010.

Zhang Yimou, a well-known Chinese film director, violated the country's family planning law by having three children without permission for the births. However, all three children were legally registered in the hukou system, Zhang only needed to show the birth certificates and marriage certificate. According to the local police in Zhang's hometown of Wuxi City in Jiangsu Province, they have passed the law to register newborns without birth permission in 2009.