Why is birth registration important for forcibly displaced and stateless persons? In situations of displacement and for stateless populations, birth registration is an important protection tool. Birth registration also helps prevent statelessness and can help facilitate solutions to stateless persons. It establishes a child’s age and legal status, their identity and parentage, and therefore serves as a lifelong “passport to protection” under the law:12 • Foundation of legal identity. Birth registration is generally the first official record providing evidence of a person’s existence under the law and their legal identity. It thus helps facilitate enjoyment of rights under the law. • Child rights. Birth registration helps ensure children have access to age-appropriate legal protection, as outlined in the CRC to which all children in a State’s jurisdiction are entitled in law. • Risk of being treated as an adult. Without birth registration, children may be unjustly treated as adults and not benefit from child-sensitive proceedings during asylum or judicial proceedings, which may have a significant impact on decisions made. • Protection from violence, abuse and exploitation. Proof of age is essential in protecting children from violence, abuse and exploitation. Children without birth registration are more vulnerable to protection risks such as trafficking, child labour, child marriage, illegal adoption, sexual exploitation, and recruitment into armed forces and groups. 12 6 • Family unity. Birth registration, by documenting the children’s parentage, serves as evidence to facilitate children’s rights to family life and unity. Family reunification can be difficult without any documents to prove their relationship with their parents and to trace children’s relatives. Lack of documentation can interfere with children’s ability to return to their country of origin and increase the risk of improper placement during reunification efforts, especially in the midst of humanitarian emergencies. • Durable solutions and complementary pathways. Durable solutions for refugees, such as voluntary return to the country of origin, and accessing complementary pathways to a third country, including family reunification, labour or educational pathways, are usually more difficult without proof of legal identity such as a birth certificate. “ Universal birth registration is impossible to ignore and entirely possible to achieve.” Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu UNICEF, “A passport to protection: A guide to birth registration programming” (New York, Unicef, 2013). https://www.refworld. org/reference/themreport/unicef/2013/en/98159. Birth registration of forcibly displaced and stateless persons