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In global efforts to end statelessness and improve child protection,
international organizations such as the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) 20 and the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF)21
advocate for universal birth registration. 22 Birth registration is essential to
ensuring that the state will recognize a person’s citizenship later in life.
“Recording birth provides a record of an individual’s life-a name, a
family, a country, a sex; in short, recording birth provides an identity. The
birth certificate (the receipt, so to speak, of this registration) is evidence
of one’s existence and identity-and citizenship.” 23 Most people are
entitled to citizenship at birth because of birth in territory or parentage,
but in practice, without birth registration, a person may find themselves
unable to prove the facts that entitle them to citizenship. 24 Where
nationality law states that a person is a citizen at birth, but other legal
provisions or practices mean that the state does not recognize the person
as a citizen, a person is stateless. 25 As such, birth registration is key to
safeguarding the right to a nationality, which is guaranteed in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ICCPR. 26 The
Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness requires that states provide
20. UNHCR, GLOB. ACTION P LAN TO END S TATELESSNESS: 2014 – 2024,
https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/global-action-plan-2014-2024/
[https://perma.cc/XDL3-5A5G]
(listing among the Global Action Plan’s 10 initiatives, to ensure birth registration to prevent
statelessness).
21. UNICEF,
Birth Registration,
https://www.unicef.org/protection/birth-registration
[https://perma.cc/QYT5-NRJ8] (last accessed Mar. 26, 2023) (noting the benefits of birth registration,
reasons that births go unregistered, and UNICEF’s actions addressing birth registration). See, e.g.,
UNICEF, THE ‘R IGHTS’ S TART TO LIFE: A S TATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF B IRTH R EGISTRATION,
available
at
https://books.google.ca/books?id=rbvnF0hTQnoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
[https://perma.cc/GE52-BWVQ] (last visited July 1, 2023) (noting that birth registration is essential
to access many other rights).
22. Off. of the U.N. High Comm’r for Hum. Rts, supra note 16, at ¶ 4.
23. Annette R. Appell, Certifying Identity, 42 C AP. U. L. R EV. 361, 368 (2014) (citation
omitted).
24. Betsy L. Fisher, Gender Discrimination and Statelessness in the Gulf Cooperation Council
States, 23 MICH. J. GENDER & L. 269, 285 (2016) (“When a child’s birth is not documented, the
child’s nationality may not be recognized by her state of nationality for lack of proof that she is
entitled to that nationality. If she does not have another nationality, she will likely be left stateless.”).
25. A stateless person is someone “who is not considered as a national by any State under the
operation of its law.” Stateless Convention, supra note 15, art. 1(1); see Betsy L. Fisher, ‘The
Operation of Law’ in Statelessness Determinations under the 1954 Statelessness Convention, 33 WIS.
INT’L L.J. 254, 260 (2015) (arguing that the 1954 Stateless Convention’s definition of statelessness
requires consideration of how nationality laws are implemented).
26. G.A. Res. 217A (III), Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 15 (Dec. 10, 1948);
ICCPR supra note 20, at art. 24(3) (guaranteeing “the right to acquire a nationality.”).
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