Burkinabè but had died many years ago and that his father was unknown. The “aunt” who had taken
him away had sold him into forced labor. She is also now dead. Ali returned to Gbapleu and has
found temporary work as a field laborer to survive. He recently tried to obtain a genuine Burkinabè
consular card, on the basis of the information he had found out about his origins, but the Burkinabè
consular authorities refused to give him one because he had no documentary proof of his birth or
parentage and because he had used an old consular card that was not his. He lives desperate and
ostracized from the Burkinabè communities of his birth, as well as where he has lived for over
twenty years.
5.6. Individuals refused Ivorian national and voter ID cards for the 2010 elections
The final voter list for the 2010 presidential elections was validated in September 2010 after
a three-year process that combined the drawing up of this list with the identification of Ivorian
nationals. It certified 5,725,720 Ivorian nationals as eligible to vote. This number represented 86.3%
of all who applied to register to vote (6,636,263), but only 66% of the Prime Minister’s estimated
total voter population (8,663,149) based on projections calculated by the National Statistics
Institute.195
In this process, 601,322 persons who applied for Ivorian ID and voter cards were rejected
and placed on what was called the “gray list” for having undetermined nationality. To date, the
status of those on the “gray list” has not been resolved. What can be said about the statelessness
and nationality considerations of those included on this list?
Recall that the Ouagadougou Peace Agreement (APO) of 2007 called for the launch of
mobile court hearings to assist people with obtaining jugements supplétifs in order to participate in
the national identification and voter registration schemes. For the voter list, anyone on the 2000
voter list would automatically obtain Ivorian national ID cards and be re-registered for the
forthcoming elections. With respect to identification of Ivorian nationals from 2007 to 2010, the
APO relaxed the documentary conditions and only required that applicants produce a birth
certificate or jugement supplétif to prove their identity to be checked by the government.196
An Interministerial working group devised a system to check the names of those who came
forward to register to vote against what it called the “merged database of Ivorian nationals,” and the
“merged database of foreigners.”197 If the named applicant was not found in the databases, the
names of the applicant’s parents were checked to see if they could be found in the databases.198
The 12 historical databases used for this exercise included: the 1990 and 1995 voter lists; the
1998 census; lists of the administrative agencies that managed social insurance and pensions of the
private and public sectors; the list of public servants; the list of those who acquired Ivorian
nationality through naturalization; the database of those who held the green national ID cards issued
between November 1998 and January 2000; civil status records, including information on jugements
supplétifs issued in the 2007 mobile court hearings; and the database of cartes de séjour issued to
ECOWAS and non-ECOWAS citizens.199
Given the history of the amendments made to the identification laws and concerns about
how they were – and more often were not – implemented in practice, serious questions remain
195
EU Election Observation Mission, supra note 134.
See discussion in Section 4.2 above.
197
Atoine Adou and Moktar Lam, Identification – Enregistrement Electronique de la Population & des Electeurs:
Cas de la Côte d’Ivoire, European Commission / UNDP Thematic Workshop on information Technology and
Elections Management held in Mombasa, Kenya from 5-9 March 2012.
198
Notre Voie, Crise Ivoirienne, Liste électorale provisoire – Le DG de l’INS explique le mécanisme du
croisement, 9 October 2009.
199
Adou and Lam, supra note 197.
196
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