systems including: (1) mobile court hearings, or audiences foraines, to deliver jugements supplétifs to those – both nationals and foreigners – who were born in Côte d’Ivoire and had never declared their births in accordance with laws;130 (2) a process to reconstitute civil status registers that had been lost or destroyed due to the political and military crisis; (3) the relaunching of the identification process; and (4) voter registration leading up to the establishment of a new voter list. The greatest political compromise of the APO131 was to relax the proof of identity necessary to obtain a national ID card and to be registered on the forthcoming voter list. Decree No. 2007647132 codified the APO’s political deal regarding identification, with Articles 4 and 5 creating a twostep approach. First, in the immediate and short term, all persons on the voter list validated by the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI) for the forthcoming elections would automatically obtain Ivorian national ID cards. For that process, all those on the 2000 voter list were automatically reregistered for the new voter list, while all other persons over 18 years of age not on the 2000 voter list would only have to produce either a copy of their birth certificate or jugement supplétif in order to undergo a series of background checks as described in Section 5.6 below to be registered on the 2010 voter list and obtain a national ID card. By contrast, a second process of “ordinary identification” for the future would require applicants for national ID cards to produce not only a birth certificate or jugement supplétif but also a certificate of nationality. Between 2007 and 2010 therefore, birth certificates and jugements supplétifs became the only identification document required to obtain a national ID card and vote in the forthcoming elections as an Ivorian national. This was so despite the fact that any statement of the nationality of a person’s parents on such documents are not, in fact, a definitive determination or judgment of their nationality. All stages related to the issuance of jugements supplétifs, identification, and the drawing up of the new voter list in implementation of the APO in the lead-up to the 2010 elections encountered popular resistance revolving around the issue of properly distinguishing foreigners from Ivorian nationals. In spite of this, the crisis-recovery process proceeded towards the final adoption of a revised voter list. The results of the special civil status and identification efforts are as follows: the mobile court program led to the late birth registration of and issuance of late birth certificates to 750,000 persons between September 2007 and September 2008,133 and 250,000 civil status registers were reconstituted between May 2008 and May 2009 pursuant to the special program that emerged from the APO.134 As for the results of the first stage of the extraordinary identification program, after a long and contentious process of background checks, the CEI certified the final voter list including 5,725,721 Ivorian nationals, all of whom were issued Ivorian national ID cards. This number is significantly lower than the figure of 8,663,149 that the Prime Minister’s office put forward in 2005 as its estimated number of Ivorian nationals above 18 who would be eligible to vote based on the population projections of the National Statistics Institute.135 Furthermore, 601,322 persons applied 130 This special program of mobile court hearings followed the normal rules with respect to late birth registration; in other words, it only required an individual to produce the oral testimonies of two witnesses in order to establish the facts surrounding their birth and background, including their parents’ nationality. 131 Ouagadougou Political Accord, Sections 1.3.1 and 1.3.2. An English translation by the United Nations of this Agreement is available at: http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2007/144. 132 Décret No. 2007-647 du 20 décembre 2007 portant conditions d’établissement, d’obtention et de forme de la Carte Nationale d’Identité. 133 UN, Eighteenth progress report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire, S/2008/645, 13 October 2008, para. 28. 134 Mission d’Observation Electorale de l’Union Européenne, Rapport Final, Election Présidentielle 31 octobre – 28 novembre 2010, 25 January 2011 [hereinafter EU Election Observation Mission]. 135 Id. 39