Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals time included support for civil registration and identification, as part of efforts to promote easier access to government services, employment and property title.156 The importance of legal identity for development was then recognized by SDG Target 16.9, whereby States should “by 2030 provide legal identity for all, including free birth registration”. Effective identification systems are also needed to support many other SDG targets, including: access to finance and social protection systems (Target 1.3); health and education (SDGs 3 and 4); recognition of ownership of land and other assets (Target 1.4); and to measure progress against many of the targets under SDGs 3 and 4, as well as under SDG 5 on health, education and gender equality.157 Civil registration systems can also provide data to measure fulfilment of the SDGs.158 In order to end statelessness and the exclusion of stateless people, however, it is important to pay attention to the details of legal identity,159 as not all stateless people lack identity documents. In some countries, such as Lebanon160, Kuwait 161 and Thailand162, there are different types of documents affording different levels of status to long-term stateless populations that are otherwise indistinguishable from each other, or indeed from nationals. The UN Legal Identity Agenda, which outlines a common approach to the broader issues of registration and legal identity, has adopted a definition of “legal identity” that indicates that new identification systems should be linked to civil registration, “to ensure a holistic approach to legal identity from birth to death”.163 The focus of Target 16.9 on legal identity, must therefore also consider the issuance of specific identity documents that recognize nationality or provide a basis on which nationality can be claimed. Birth registration Birth registration is established by the human rights treaties as the first right of every child.164 Universal birth registration is critical for child protection, to ensure children’s rights to parental care and family reunification where relevant, to treatment as a child within the legal system, to inheritance from their parents and to protection from child marriage. The lack of legal recognition of a family relationship thus leaves children vulnerable to many forms of abuse. Lack of birth registration is both a cause and consequence of statelessness. Lack of birth registration can prevent the establishment of the necessary legal link to a parent who in fact has a recognized nationality, or to the country in which the child was born. In the case of foundlings of unknown parents, procedures will be necessary to ensure the child’s entry in the civil registry even if the presumption of nationality exists in law. In addition, stateless parents often lack the required identity documents to be able to register a birth or, being among the poorest in society, simply lack the means to navigate complex administrative procedures without assistance, perpetuating statelessness into the next generation. 156. OECD and World Bank, Integrating Human Rights into Development, 75, 230, 260. 157. Mariana Dahan and Alan Gelb, “The role of identification in the post-2015 development agenda”, Working Paper (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2015), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/22513; Alan Gelb and Anna Diofasi Metz, Identification Revolution: Can Digital ID Be Harnessed for Development? (Washington DC: Center for Global Development, 2018), www.cgdev.org/publication/identification-revolution-candigital-id-be-harnessed-development. 158. Dahan and Gelb, “The role of identification in the post-2015 development agenda”. 159. Bronwen Manby, “‘Legal identity for all’ and statelessness: opportunity and threat at the junction of public and private international law”, Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2, No. 2 (2020): 248–71. 160. Frontiers Ruwad, “Invisible citizens: humiliation and a life in the shadows – a legal and policy study on statelessness in Lebanon” (Beirut, 2011), https://upr-info.org/sites/default/files/documents/2015-10/fr_upr23_lbn_e_annexe1.pdf. 161. Claire Beaugrand, “Statelessness & administrative violence: Bidūns’ survival strategies in Kuwait”, The Muslim World 101, No. 2 (2011): 228–50, https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-1913.2011.01354.x; Amnesty International, “‘I don’t have a future’”, 15. 162. Abigaël Pesses, “Highland birth and citizenship registration in Thailand: final report on Karen focus group discussions in Chiang Mai Province” (UNESCO, 2007), https://hal.science/hal-01736494; Amanda Flaim, “Problems of evidence, evidence of problems: expanding citizenship and reproducing statelessness among highlanders in northern Thailand”, in Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness, ed. Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 163. UN Operational Definition of Legal Identity https://unstats.un.org/legal-identity-agenda/. 164. UNICEF, “Birth registration: right from the start”, Innocenti Digest (Geneva: United Nations, March 2002), https://crvs.unescap.org/sites/default/files/ resources/UNICEF%20Birth%20Registration%20right%20from%20the%20start_0.pdf; UNICEF, “A passport to protection: a guide to birth registration programming” (Geneva: United Nations, December 2013), www.refworld.org/docid/52b2e2bd4.html; UNHCR, “Good practices paper – Action 7: ensuring birth registration for the prevention of statelessness” (Geneva: United Nations, November 2017), www.refworld.org/reference/themreport/ unhcr/2017/en/122586. 43