‘Legal Identity for All’ and Statelessness return to the country of origin, exceptional procedures may be needed to recognise the child’s status in the absence of consular registration and transcription of a birth certificate. 72 CIVIL REGISTRATION IN THE UN SYSTEM The UN system has historically not done much to address these challenges. Civil registration is ‘owned’ by the Statistical Commission, whose secretariat is the Statistics Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The function of civil registration, the legal registration of vital events, is combined with the collection of vital statistics based on that registration, to provide information on the population of a country. The first edition of the UN Handbook of Vital Statistics Methods, published in 1955, emphasised the primary value of civil registration as legal, and only secondarily as a source of vital statistics. In poorer countries where civil registration coverage is incomplete, surveys are more practical tools to gather information needed for government planning. 73 But the housing of international coordination of efforts to improve civil registration within the statistical arm of the UN led the statistics aspects of what came to be known as civil registration and vital statistics (‘CRVS’) to dominate, important as they are to richer countries where registration is nearly complete, for the purposes of state planning and to guide interventions in public health (especially through registration of cause of death). 74 Only a 1998 publication on preparation of a legal framework placed stronger emphasis on registration of legal status and protection of individual rights. 75 The current UN Principles and Recommendations for a Vital Statistics System, adopted in 2014, continue to note that ‘the essential purpose of civil registration is to furnish legal instruments of direct interest to individuals’; 76 but a scant handful of pages in the 150 page document relate to the legal aspect. Civil registration for whatever purpose was for many decades a generally neglected part of the international agenda. This changed around the turn of the millennium. UNICEF placed new emphasis on the importance of birth registration 72 73 74 75 76 For the situation of the ‘red-coded’ former Liberian refugees in West Africa, see Bronwen Manby, Nationality, Migration and Statelessness in West Africa (Study, UNHCR and International Organisation for Migration 2015) <https://www.unhcr.org/ecowas2015/Nationality-Migration-and-Statelessness-in-WestAfrica-REPORT-EN.pdf>. Statistical Office of the United Nations, Handbook of Vital Statistics Methods (United Nations, Studies in Methods Series F No 7, 1955) ch 1(B) <https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic-social/Standards-andMethods/files/Handbooks/crvs/Series_F7-E.pdf>. van der Straaten (n 8) 20–21. United Nations Statistics Division, Handbook on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems: Preparation of a Legal Framework (United Nations, Studies in Methods Series F No 71, 1998) ch 1 <https://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/SeriesF/SeriesF_71E.pdf>. The Handbook also raised concerns about the issue of a single number to a person, which ‘removes the personal characteristics that have traditionally served to establish a person’s identity’: at 16 [39]. Principles and Recommendations for a Vital Statistics System (n 36) 66 [286]. 261