number of children U5 registered and certified increasing by 79% and 125%, respectively, over 2020. Yet substantial efforts are needed to register all newborns at birth and clear the backlog of unregistered children to recover from the full impact of the pandemic and accelerate the progress to achieve the 2030 Agenda of legal identity for all, including universal birth registration. Various strategies have yielded considerable progress, including those that simplified business process, increased interoperability among systems and sectors, and demand creation through policy and legislative reform. Nationality: One of the most extreme consequence of the denial of this right is statelessness – a predicament which is an antithesis to the best interests of the child.6 There are estimated to be millions of stateless people globally. Inherited statelessness is a primary driver of statelessness amongst children, locking generations out of nationality and trapping adults and children alike in a vicious cycle of exclusion and discrimination. Children can also be left without a nationality as a result of “discriminatory laws, policies and practices that aim to exclude or have the effect of excluding people who are considered as foreign”,7 with an estimated 75% of the world’s stateless people belonging to minority groups.8 Moreover, in 25 countries, women cannot pass their nationality to their child on an equal basis as men, meaning these children must acquire nationality from their father, but where his whereabouts are unknown, or he himself is stateless or is unwilling or incapable to confer his nationality, the child is left in a precarious situation with no access to nationality.9 Migration, displacement, conflict, the re-drawing of borders, lack of birth registration, child separation or abandonment, and lack of recognition of family relations are all factors that can expose children to a heightened risk of statelessness. Family relations: The right to have one’s family relations legally established or recognized is a standalone right is also integral to achieving the right to name and nationality. Specifically, each person has a family history – genetic, gestational, social and legal – that contributes to his or her identity and origins. Family relations include connections that arise as a result of this history, continuity or separation, encompassing birth, adoptive and intending parents in surrogacy arrangements, gamete donors, siblings, grandparents and others. Without transparent and accurate information about family origins, children’s identity is incomplete. This may lead to children being excluded from benefits of legal parentage such as child support, and hereditary and maintenance laws. It may also lead to statelessness. Comprehensive information about family origins is further essential to ensure the highest attainable standard of health and well-being. Deprived of family health history, children and adults affected have less information about their genetic health risks.10 A further layer of complexity may be added to these situations, when multiple States are involved in the creation, modification and/or falsification of the child’s identity. Legal challenges may arise in identifying which State, courts or authorities have jurisdiction to decide on identity issues and which laws apply. Further, Civil Registration systems are generally not set up to ensure the automatic 6 7 8 African Committee on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, Nubian Minors v. Kenya, Decision, 22 March 2011. UNHCR, Background Note on Gender Equality, Nationality Laws and Statelessness 2021, 5 March 2021. https://www.refworld.org/docid/604257d34.html. UN Human Rights Council, Impact of the arbitrary deprivation of nationality on the enjoyment of the rights of children concerned, and existing laws and practices on accessibility for children to acquire nationality, inter alia, of the country in which they are b orn, if they otherwise would be stateless, 16 December 2015, A/HRC/31/29. 9 Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, A/HRC/38/52, 25 April 2018, paras 41 and 55. 10 For example, World Health Organization. (n.d.). Breast cancer: prevention and control. https://www.who.int/cancer/detection/breastcancer/en/.