Good Practices Paper Action 7 Ensuring birth registration for the prevention of statelessness UNHCR is publishing a series of Good Practices Papers to help States, with the support of other stakeholders, achieve the goals of its #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024. These goals are to: Resolve the major situations of statelessness that exist today Prevent the emergence of new cases of statelessness Improve the identification and protection of stateless populations Each Good Practices Paper corresponds to one of the 10 Actions proposed in UNHCR’s Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014 – 2024 (Global Action Plan) and highlights examples of how States, UNHCR and other stakeholders have addressed statelessness in a number of countries. Solutions to the problem of statelessness have to be tailored to suit the particular circumstances prevalent in a country. As such, these examples are not intended to serve as a blueprint for strategies to counter statelessness everywhere. (Indeed, some of the examples are of countries where gaps in law and practice remain.) However, governments, NGOs, international organizations and UNHCR staff seeking to implement the Global Action Plan should be able to adapt the ideas they find in these pages to their own needs. 1. Background Action 7 of the Global Action Plan calls on States to ‘ensure birth registration for the prevention of statelessness’, as birth certificates provide key information that assists children to confirm or acquire nationality. The links between birth registration and the acquisition of nationality are explained in more detail in Section 1.3. The objective of Action 7 is that by 2024 no cases of statelessness occur due to lack of birth registration. Achieving this depends heavily on the functioning of national civil registration systems, which in principle are to provide universal access consistent with the duty of every State to register all births that occur in its territory.1 1 1 See, e.g., Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 7(1). CAMPAIGN TO END STATELESSNESS WITHIN 10 YE ARS