explained to the Statelessness Network Asia Pacific: “My son’s birth was not registered when we lived in our home village. He was only one years old when we fled and sought protection in the IDP camp. I had to pay 45,000 Kyat (approximately 30USD) in “unofficial fees” to the midwife in the IDP camp to register our child and receive a birth certificate. The midwife in the IDP camp told me that I had to pay the fee because “I was out of time to register my son’s birth”.” Children with disabilities shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right to acquire a nationality - Article 18(2) 46. The abovementioned barriers to birth registration in Myanmar demonstrate that not all children in Myanmar enjoy the right to be registered immediately after birth and the right to acquire a nationality. 47. This disproportionately impacts children of ethnic minorities and therefore also children of ethnic minorities with disabilities. One of the reasons for this disparity is that Myanmar’s citizenship and civil registration and documentation law and policy framework does not guarantee immediate registration and the right to acquire a nationality for all children in Myanmar. That is, the Child Rights Law 2019, enacted on 24 July 2019, provides that “every child registered for birth shall have the right to citizenship only in accordance with provisions under existing law”.56 This adopts the formulation of the previous 1993 Child Law, although of which did not recognise the right to registration at birth.57 48. In practice, the 1993 Child Law has been interpreted by authorities to restrict the right to a nationality in accordance with the 1982 Citizenship Law’s discriminatory and arbitrary criteria.58 The result is that a number of ethnic groups are excluded from the right to a nationality and other groups only acquire the lesser types of citizenship (“naturalised” or “associate”).59 The formulation of the Child Rights Law 2019, by deferring to the 1982 Citizenship Law, undermines the aims of the Child Rights Law 2019, particularly the objective of implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the principle of the best interests of the child.60 49. The various barriers to the immediate registration of all children, including the limitations of the 2019 Child Rights Law, must be considered in any roll out of online, mobile birth registration systems by the Myanmar Government and its partners (such as UNICEF and Telenor), so as to prevent further entrenching such barriers.61 56 International Commission of Jurists, 9 July 2019, “Myanmar’s Child Rights Bill and the right of a child to acquire a nationality” https://www.icj.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Myanmar-Child-Bill-AdvocacyAnalysis-brief-2019-ENG.pdf. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid, and International Commission of Jurists, ��Citizenship Law and Human Rights in Myanmar: Why Law Reform is Urgent and Possible,” 25 June 2019, available at: https://www.icj.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/06/Myanmar-Citizenship-law-reform-Advocacy-AnalysisBrief2019-ENG.pdf. The Committee on the Rights of the Child, in 2012, made a number of recommendations to Myanmar with respect to addressing barriers to birth registration – Committee on the Rights of the Child, 14 March 2012, “Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 44 of the Convention”, CRC/C/MMR/CO/3-4, para 44. 61 Pyae Thet Phyo, 29 August 2018, “Online Registration of births and deaths trialled in Mon State”, Myanmar Times, https://www.mmtimes.com/news/online-registration-births-and-deaths-trialled-mon-state.html 11