permanent, compulsory and universal recording within the civil registry of the occurrence and characteristics of birth, in accordance with the national legal requirements’, is already a long-standing objective of UNICEF and other agencies concerned with child welfare (UNICEF, 2002). Birth registration may be essential for the protection of many rights; and it provides critical evidence of the main facts determining the nationality of the child (UNICEF, 2013; UN Human Rights Council, 2014). Article 8 of the CRC, the product of advocacy efforts by the newly democratic Argentinian government in the wake of forced adoptions during the military dictatorship (Arditti, 1999), introduces the overarching concept of ‘identity’, establishing the child’s right ‘to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law’ and places an obligation on states to re-establish identity if ‘a child is illegally deprived of some or all of the elements of his or her identity’. The CRC establishes the content of ‘identity’ through an open rather than closed list, allowing for other elements to be included beyond name, nationality, and family relations, as appropriate in the context (Doek, 2006). The right to recognition as a person before the law established in international human rights treaties is freestanding, and not dependent on official identification. Similarly, the right to identity in the CRC is stated separately from the right to birth registration. However, it has for a long time also been clear that without official recognition and registration of identity a person’s rights may be significantly curtailed in practice. The SDG target to ‘provide legal identity’ is therefore best understood as an objective to enable proof of legal identity. Legal identity and development Birth registration, and civil registration of life events generally, has two functions: the legal function emphasised by the human rights framework, and as a source of statistics. From 1955, the first version of the UN Handbook of Vital Statistics Methods emphasised the primary value of civil registration as legal, and only secondarily as a source of statistics, especially in poorer countries where surveys are more practical tools (UN Statistical Office, 1955, p. 5; see also UN Statistics Division, 1998, para. 74). Nevertheless, the statistics aspect of civil registration generally gained more attention (for states where coverage was nearly complete), considered ‘vital for policy making and for monitoring, generating statistics for policy formulation, planning and implementation, and monitoring of population dynamics and health indicators on a continuous basis’ (UN Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, 2014, p. 19), and as a key tool in shaping public health interventions (The Lancet, 2007, 2015). There is extensive international guidance on the development and management of civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems (most authoritatively, UN Statistics Division, 2014). The legal identity element of a CRVS system, however, has been relatively neglected (Harbitz, 2013). With the adoption of the SDG target, recognition of the importance of officially recognised ‘legal identity’ is now everywhere in the development policy literature. Without proof of legal identity, in the form of an official entry in a state register and (usually) a document issued as evidence of that entry, people are invisible to the state and other agencies that are working to fulfil the different goals and monitor their implementation (Stuart et al., 2015). Those without proof of legal identity, predominantly the poor and disproportionately women, are excluded from the formal economy (Desai et al., 2018). Effective identification systems are needed to support many other SDG targets, including access to finance and social protection systems (Target 1.3), as well as health and education (Goals 3 and 4); for 3