Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals Often, verification procedures are assigned to local authorities or committees without any legal framework to give them authority to guide their decisions. The lack of clearly established criteria for the evidence that must be submitted for nationality to be recognized can cause or perpetuate statelessness. Although an appeal to a court may in principle be available, it is usually expensive to access courts, in terms of time, transport costs and fees (official and unofficial), as well as often requiring – by law or in practice – legal assistance to prepare an application. “Vetting committees” in Kenya, for example, were made up of a mixture of State officials and State-appointed community leaders, and created major additional bureaucratic hurdles for communities in which many members were or had in the past been stateless; those generally presumed to be Kenyan were not subject to the same burdens on their time and economic productivity.149 Similarly, in Lebanon, local officials known as mukhtars establish at their own discretion the conditions for grant of the identity document known as a ta’arif card that may be issued to “unregistered” stateless persons to enable them to access some rights and services; this leaves them potentially vulnerable to arbitrary decision-making.150 The issue by local governments of “certificates of indigeneity” in Nigeria or the “kebele ID” in Ethiopia, which are the foundational identity documents for recognition of nationality, are not formally authorized by law and may in practice be denied on discriminatory grounds.151 Legal identity, statelessness and development SDG 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. Target 16.9: By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration. The Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion is among many that have noted the “insidious impact” of lack of documentation in all areas of life for stateless people, from access to relief, health care and vaccinations, to being able to work in safe and non-exploitative jobs and access justice.152 Those without proof of legal identity, predominantly the poor and disproportionately women, are excluded from the formal economy.153 The ability to prove legal identity, while not a cure for all forms of exclusion, is nonetheless an important enabler for inclusion, even without other measures.154 After a long period of neglect, the importance of official registration of legal identity both for rights and for development has been increasingly recognized.155 Rights-based approaches to development have for some 149. Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, “An identity crisis? Study on the Issuance of national identity cards in Kenya” (Nairobi, 2007), www. knchr.org/Portals/0/EcosocReports/KNCHR%20Final%20IDs%20Report.pdf; Manby, “Citizenship and statelessness in the East African community”. 150. UNHCR and Siren Associates, “Mapping and understanding statelessness in Akkar”, 26. 151. Laurent Fourchard, “Bureaucrats and indigenes: producing and bypassing certificates of origin in Nigeria”, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 85, No. 1 (2015): 37–58, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0001972014000734; Henry Gyang Mang and David Ehrhardt, “The politics of paper: negotiating over and around indigeneship certification in Plateau State, Nigeria”, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 52, No. 3 (2018): 331–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2018.1546602; Yonatan Tesfaye Fessha and Beza Dessalegn, “Internal migration, ethnic federalism and differentiated citizenship in an African federation: the case of Ethiopia”, in Federalism and National Diversity in the 21st Century, ed. Alain-G. Gagnon and Arjun Tremblay (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020), 269–88; World Bank Identification for Development Initiative, “ID4D Country Diagnostic: Ethiopia” (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group, 2017), https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/ documents-reports/documentdetail/822621524689442102/id4d-country-diagnostic-ethiopia; World Bank Identification for Development Initiative, “Barriers to the inclusion of women and marginalized groups in Nigeria’s ID system: findings and solutions from an in-depth qualitative study” (Washington, D.C., 2021), https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/881401618990982108/barriers-to-theinclusion-of-women-and-marginalized-groups-in-nigeria-s-id-system-findings-and-solutions-from-an-in-depth-qualitative-study. 152. Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, “Together we can: the COVID-19 impact on stateless people and a roadmap for change”, 2021, www. institutesi.org/resources/together-we-can-report. 153. Vyjayanti T. Desai, Anna Diofasi Metz, and Jing Lu, “The global identification challenge: who are the 1 billion people without proof of identity?”, World Bank (blog), 25 April 2018, https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/global-identification-challenge-who-are-1-billion-people-without-proof-identity; Lucia Hanmer and Maria Elefante, “Achieving universal access to ID: gender-based legal barriers against women and good practice reforms”, Identification for Development Initiative (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2019), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32474; World Bank, “New global ID coverage estimates–850 Million without ID”, in Identification for Development (ID4D) and Digitalizing G2P Payments (G2Px) 2022 Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2023), 18–21, https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/ documentdetail/099437402012317995/idu00fd54093061a70475b0a3b50dd7e6cdfe147. 154. Simon Szreter, “The right of registration: development, identity registration, and social security – a historical perspective”, World Development 35, No. 1 (January 2007): 67–86, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2006.09.004; Wendy Hunter, “Identity documents, welfare enhancement, and group empowerment in the Global South”, Journal of Development Studies 55, No. 3 (2019): 366–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2018.1451637. 155. For a survey of this literature, see Bronwen Manby, “The Sustainable Development Goals and ‘legal identity for all’: ‘first, do no harm’”, World Development 139 (2021): 105343, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105343. 42