Birth registration highlighted at UN event

Speakers at the event highlighting the importance of birth registration

11 July 2010: Plan and partners organised a side event at the UN in Geneva in co-operation with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to highlight the importance of birth registration.

The interactive event was attended by around 40 people from UN agencies, governments and international and national non-governmental organisations.

The event helped to:

• raise awareness on the policy and operational challenges for birth registration
• identify gaps at policy and operational levels
• identify existing experiences and practices that address some of these challenges.
  

Millions unregistered

Anne-Sophie Lois, Plan’s representative in Geneva, highlighted that although a child’s right to an identity is set out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), more than 51,000,000 children every year are not registered at birth. Millions of refugees, displaced and stateless children are denied the right to registration at birth.

“Birth registration continues to be a challenge in many parts of the world due to legal, administrative, political, and cultural obstacles. A birth certificate not only gives access to rights but is also an efficient protection tool. The CRC committees concluding observations urge states to provide children not only with a birth certificate but also with a nationality and protect them from becoming stateless,” she said.

Protection concern

Volker Turk, Director of Division of International Protection, said that birth registration is an ‘acute protection concern’, and has become global priority for UNHCR. Birth registration is fundamental to the human rights of nationals and non-nationals. UNHCR has a mandate to intercede, but states must engage in order to make it sustainable. 

He called for  a global advocacy campaign around birth registration linked to the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention and 50th anniversary of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness where authorities could be sensitised and supported to complete birth registrations.

Watch video of Plan’s Universal Birth Registration campaign and remaining protection challenges