2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) target intends; but also as instruments of exclusion, surveillance and control. 5 Moreover, the process of sorting individuals into different nationalities is, by its nature, discriminatory and not necessarily empowering. 6 But even if we accept the assumption that recognition and registration of a person’s legal identity by the state is ‘the crucial primary instrument for realising entitlements’, 7 and that recognition or acquisition of nationality is always a good, what has become most apparent in six years is the immense complexity of an assessment of the SDG commitment to ‘provide legal identity’ in relation to the resolution of statelessness. The following Parts set out the existing legal framework for ‘identity’ and birth registration in international law; followed by a discussion of the complexities of the recognition of civil registration documents across borders; the contribution of the UN system to the strengthening of civil registration systems; the interpretation of the ‘legal identity’ target by the development community; and finally the likely interaction between ‘legal identity’ and the effort to end statelessness. The article concludes that the combined efforts of private and public international law are needed to overcome the very substantial risk that short cuts will create long delays for stateless persons, and to ensure that the target has a positive impact on the prevention and reduction of statelessness. SDG Target 16.9 is both an opportunity and a threat for those who are most marginalised within current systems for official recognition of legal identity. LEGAL IDENTITY AND BIRTH REGISTRATION IN INTERNATIONAL LAW The difficulty of understanding the potential impact of SDG Target 16.9 starts from the fact that ‘legal identity’ is not a term that had any pre-existing definition in international law. The indicator adopted to measure progress, the percentage of children under five whose birth has been registered, leaves significant uncertainty on what it would take to know that the target had been reached; 8 thus, ‘there is no simple answer to the measurement question’. 9 This is most obviously true in relation to any person over five years old; but also for birth registration itself, both the technical criteria for measuring coverage, and the elements of identity that should be recorded within the birth register. 5 6 7 8 9 Collected volumes of the past two decades review this history in comparative perspective: see Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton University Press 2001); Colin J Bennett and David Lyon (eds), Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective (Routledge 2008); Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford University Press 2012); Ilsen About, James Brown and Gayle Lonergan (eds), Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). Dimitry Kochenov, Citizenship (MIT Press 2019); Dimitry Kochenov and Justin Lindeboom (eds), Kälin and Kochenov’s Quality of Nationality Index: An Objective Ranking of the Nationalities of the World (Hart Publishing 2020). Simon Szreter and Keith Breckenridge, ‘Editors’ Introduction: Recognition and Registration: The Infrastructure of Personhood in World History’ in Breckenridge and Szreter (n 5) 1, 12. Jaap van der Straaten, ‘Legal Identity for All by 2030: How Will We Know?’ (Position Paper, Civil Registration Centre for Development—CRC4D 2015) <https://www.crc4d.com/downloads/2015-10-legal-identity-for-all-by-2030-how-will-weknow-position-paper.pdf>. Alan Gelb and Anna Diofasi Metz, Identification Revolution: Can Digital ID Be Harnessed for Development? (Center for Global Development 2018) 36. 250