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noted the intersections of disability with mobility and ethnicity when it lamented the “absence
of systematic, disaggregated data on persons with disabilities across all sectors of the State party,
including persons with disabilities who have been subjected to violence and persons with disabilities who are internally displaced, migrants, refugees, stateless and/or belong to minority
groups” (2019, para. 59). Such data are needed as a planning input for social protection of
persons with disabilities. If unregistered, disabled children cannot receive identity cards, which
are needed to access support services and other forms of social protection.
Kuwait and the UAE have also received recommendations on birth registration from the CRPD,
with interesting intersections between disability and ethnic discrimination affecting the stateless
Bidoon. The Bidoon are a formerly nomadic Arab minority group living primarily in Kuwait who
have been made stateless as part of the ideological governance of citizen and noncitizen others
(Alexander, 2020; Alshammiry, 2021; Lori, 2019). Within this context, the nonissuance of birth
certificates for stateless Bidoon not only perpetuates their political condition intergenerationally;
it also blocks access to social protection for children born with a disability. Finally, it shows how
the “good practice” touted by development agencies of linking birth registration to social protection
can create a disincentive for registering children who are multiply marginalized—in this case,
people whose disability intersects with their ethnicity or assigned migration status.
Gender + racial discrimination + migration status in access to reproductive healthcare
The final example demonstrates the importance of both intersectionality and relationality, in this
case between mother and child. The violation of a pregnant woman’s right to reproductive healthcare can lead to the violation of her child’s right to an identity and a nationality. When births take
place outside institutional settings, they often remain unregistered either because there is no official
birth notification establishing mother–child filiation or because of the nonexistence or complexity
of procedures. The process for registering a baby born at home and/or with a midwife—especially
if the birth attendant is not registered herself—is not straightforward in many places.7 The demographic literature had already established this correlation in places such as Kenya and Malaysia
(Cheong & Baltazar, 2021; Juma et al., 2016), as had public health studies that recognize noninstitutional or unattended home birth as an obstacle to birth registration (Dake & Fuseini, 2018;
Garenne et al., 2016; Nomura et al., 2018). It has been well documented by UN Women and others
that migrant and refugee women face challenges accessing sexual and reproductive health and rights
(Hennebry et al., 2017; Piper, 2008). Yet nothing had been written in the human rights literature
on how this affects access to birth registration and citizenship for their children.
The Global Inventory—whose intersectional methodology looked across the treaty bodies to
establish correlations between different types of discrimination—revealed many examples in
which racialized migrant and minority women face obstacles to care, including mistreatment,
intersecting forms of discrimination, fear of deportation, militarized maternity wards, and lack
of insurance.8 This was the case for women whose bodies were marked by gender and ethnicity,
such as Dominican women of Haitian descent in the DR, Indigenous women in the Republic
of the Congo, Roma women in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro, as well as racialized
migrant women who could not access care. This affects refugee and asylum-seeking women and
girls who gave birth while transiting through the Balkans, Sub-Saharan migrant women in
Algeria and Morocco, and Syrian refugee women in Lebanon. It confirms with evidence the
correlation statelessness scholar van Waas (2007) raised about how the relatively low rate of
hospital births for the children of migrants with irregular status can contribute to child
statelessness.
Even when reproductive healthcare is provided to migrant women regardless of their status,
in line with international human rights obligations,9 discriminatory documentation practices by
healthcare personnel can affect their ability to establish the baby’s legal identity and citizenship.
As state concerns about irregular migration mount, border enforcement is creeping into other
areas of life, such as healthcare. The Global Inventory identified an extralegal practice in which