‘Legal Identity for All’ and Statelessness states should, by 2030, ‘provide legal identity for all, including birth registration’. 1 The indicator adopted to measure progress towards Target 16.9 was the percentage of children under five whose births have been registered, a statistic already widely available. 2 One year earlier, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) had launched a ten-year campaign to end statelessness by 2024, the #IBelong campaign, including a ten-point global action plan, with universal birth registration as Action 7. While birth registration in itself does not confer nationality, and is usually not legally proof of nationality, the official record of the place and date of birth and identity of the parents of the child provides critical evidence of the facts that enable the child to assert the right to nationality in one or more states. 3 In principle, SDG Target 16.9 should provide a significant boost to the achievement of UNHCR’s campaign, especially the ambition to end statelessness at birth. Yet it is notable that the SDG target endorsed by states was for a less specific and less demanding target — legal identity rather than nationality for all — and set a longer time frame than the UNHCR campaign. On the one hand, the meaning of ‘legal identity’ was not clear; on the other, a person may have a document that is official proof of identity and yet still be stateless. The SDG target also does not have any equivalent to Action 8 in the #IBelong campaign, calling on states to issue nationality documentation to those with entitlement to it. At past the halfway point in the UNHCR campaign, now is a good moment to evaluate the contribution of the SDG target to its realisation, and whether the drive for ‘legal identity’ is a threat or an opportunity for the stateless. From the outset, there were concerns that the legal identity target in the SDGs could be a distraction from the campaign to eradicate statelessness, or even prove to be damaging, if underlying laws were not reformed before new official identification initiatives were rolled out. 4 There is also a long history of scholarship about the double nature of identification and registration systems: as tools to build state capacity and social welfare systems, and enable those registered to assert their rights, as the SDG 1 2 3 4 ‘Sustainable Development Goal 16’, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform (Web Page, 2015) <https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg16>. SDG indicators available at: Sustainable Development Goal Indicators Website (Web Page) <http://unstats.un.org/sdgs/>. Birth registration data is collected through UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the USAID-funded Demographic and Health Surveys. Coverage of children under one year old was also considered in Birth Registration for Every Child by 2030: Are We on Track? (Report, UNICEF December 2019) <https://data.unicef.org/resources/birth-registration-for-every-child-by-2030/>. Guidelines on Statelessness No 4: Ensuring Every Child’s Right to Acquire a Nationality through Articles 1–4 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (Guidelines, UNHCR 21 December 2012); I Am Here, I Belong: The Urgent Need to End Childhood Statelessness (Report, UNHCR November 2015); Good Practices Paper Action 7: Ensuring Birth Registration for the Prevention of Statelessness (Good Practices Paper, UNHCR November 2017). See also the UNHCR and UNICEF-led coalition on every child’s right to a nationality: IBELONG: Coalition on Every Child’s Right to a Nationality (Web Page) <https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/unicef-unhcr-coalition-child-right-nationality/>. Bronwen Manby, ‘“Legal Identity for All” and Childhood Statelessness’ in Laura van Waas and Amal de Chickera (eds), The World’s Stateless: Children (Report, Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion January 2017) 313 <http://children.worldsstateless.org/3/childhood-statelessness-and-the-sustainabledevelopment-agenda/legal-identity-for-all-and-childhood-statelessness.html>. 249