In Chile, the competent authority regarding the legal identity of all residents in the territory, nationals or foreigners, is the Civil Registry and Identification Office, which is part of the Ministry of Justice.217 The Civil Registry and Identification Office grants identification documents such as identity cards218 and passports, as well as documents and titles needed by foreigners.219 It assigns a number (Rol Único Nacional) to all registrants220 at the time of administering the registration and documentation of all births in Chile in the Civil Registry.221 According to UNICEF’s statistics on Chile, based on Chile’s reported vital statistics of 2011, 99 % of children younger than five years of age had been registered. 222 In practice, the civil registrar’s authority to indicate whether a child is born to “in transit” parents gives it the power to establish or deny nationality. The Chilean National Statistics entity estimates that late registration (defined as registration more than 30 days after birth223) was 0.6% in 2007, down from 17.4% in 1970, 5.8% in 1990, and 1.3% in 2000.224 The Civil Registry and Identification Office, in response to FOI requests, explicitly recognized that birth registration is a fundamental requirement for accessing certain social rights and benefits.225 Since 1998, Chile has implemented a series of programs to improve territorial management (Programa de Mejoramiento de la Gestión) to facilitate better identification procedures. These efforts include a program called “Identity cards in field services” (Cédulas de identidad en atenciones en terreno), which focuses on increasing institutional capacity to facilitate documentation processes for the elderly and persons with disabilities. 226 Chile has the institutional capacity and legal frameworks to provide persons born in the territory with proper documentation of identity, and it has sustained good birth registration statistics. But it has yet to adopt specialized policies to address the challenges that remain. The Civil Registry should develop a policy to identify the population affected by the pre-2014 policy and rectify erroneous registrations. In addition, more can be done to meet the needs of vulnerable populations, as examined in the next section. Case Law The Supreme Court, under the jurisdiction granted to it by Article 12 of Chile’s 1980 Constitution,227 has reviewed over a dozen cases in which children born in Chile to undocumented migrants were denied nationality based on the “in transit” exception in Article 10 of the Constitution. In all of these rulings, the court has recognized the claimants’ right to Chilean nationality, repeatedly overturning attempted denials by the Office of the Civil Registry and the Department of Foreign and Migration Affairs of the Ministry of Interior. The decisions of the Supreme Court are not binding on lower courts or the executive beyond the clarification of the rights between parties to the particular case. 58 COUNTRY PROFILES l CHILE