‘Legal Identity for All’ and Statelessness The dimension of citizenship thus cannot be ignored while still respecting the SDG objective to ‘leave no one behind’. 98 THE DANGERS OF SHORT CUTS: POPULATION REGISTRATION AND THE CREATION OF STATELESSNESS The countries where new identity registers are expected to be of the greatest benefit to the economy, to the state and to individuals, are those where the highest percentage of the population is currently unregistered. The process of enrolling those with no pre-existing official documents into a national population register that records legal status in the country requires a multitude of individual decisions about that status, whether a person is a citizen or not; and if not a citizen, whether they have another status entitling them to remain in the country. But there are many millions of people in the world whose citizenship status is simply not clear: a smaller number than those without identity documents (for many of whom citizenship will be uncontroversial), but still a very substantial figure. Among them, those facing discrimination of various kinds may well be stateless — but this would only become apparent as requirements to acquire and produce documents become more pervasive. Where new systems are adopted without considering the underlying legal and policy frameworks on nationality and family relations there are risks of generating new forms of exclusion. Indeed, the creation of new population registers has always been a danger point for the creation of stateless populations. In Lebanon, Syria, and the Gulf States, the descendants of those who were not included in the population registries created at independence remain stateless today, even though their ancestors should have been entitled to nationality under the law. 99 Similar problems arose when new registers were established in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union. 100 More recently, a campaign group representing black Mauritanians, Touche pas à ma nationalité, accused the Mauritanian government of ‘biometric genocide’ in its implementation of a new identity card system coupled with amendments to the nationality code in 2010. 101 In the Dominican Republic, support for new identity systems was instrumentalised as part of a drive to remove recognition of Dominican nationality from those of 98 Alan Gelb and Bronwen Manby, ‘Has Development Converged with Human Rights? Implications for the Legal Identity SDG’, CDG Policy Blogs (Blog Post, Center for Global Development, 3 November 2016) <https://www.cgdev.org/blog/has-developmentconverged-human-rights-implications-legal-identity-sdg>; Gelb and Diofasi Metz (n 9) 42. 99 Rania Maktabi, ‘The Lebanese Census of 1932 Revisited. Who Are the Lebanese?’ (1999) 26(2) British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 219; Zahra Albarazi, The Stateless Syrians (Report, Tilburg University Statelessness Programme May 2013); Zahra Albarazi, Regional Report on Citizenship: The Middle East and North Africa (GLOBALCIT Comparative Report No 2017/03, European University Institute Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies November 2017); Claire Beaugrand, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait (IB Tauris 2017). 100 Annelies Lottmann, ‘No Direction Home: Nationalism and Statelessness in the Baltics’ (2008) 43(3) Texas International Law Journal 503; Report on Statelessness in South Eastern Europe (Report, UNHCR September, 2011); Marjorie Farquharson, Statelessness in Central Asia (Report, UNHCR May 2011). 101 Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, ‘“Touche pas à ma nationalité”: enrôlement biométrique et controverses sur l’identification en Mauritanie’ (2018) 152(4) Politique africaine 77; Bronwen Manby, Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging (Hart Publishing 2018) ch 7.6. 265