2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) Haitian descent. 102 The new national number and biometric identity card introduced by Sudan since the secession of South Sudan in 2011 was in practice depriving people who had never considered themselves South Sudanese of their Sudanese nationality. 103 Similar patterns have been visible in Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire and many other countries. At the same time, the long struggles for the establishment of independent electoral commissions to create fairer elections are being undermined by the move to make possession of a national identity card — under the firm control of the executive — a universal prerequisite to register to vote. The saving in cost by avoiding multiple registration processes has logic; but a lack of independent oversight of the determination of who is a citizen has its own non-financial costs. In countries with low rates of documentation, immigrant populations have historically been able to dissolve into the population by the simple route of change or choice of name. 104 As official identities become fixed, this form of ‘naturalisation’ is no longer possible, making gaps in the law on acquisition of nationality — at birth or later — ever more significant. And as multiple registries for different purposes are merged into one national database, the stakes of an entry on the register are raised; meaning that the exclusion of those whose status is perceived to be doubtful is also more likely. The World Bank’s Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development, endorsed by a wide range of international agencies and private sector actors, include a commitment to non-discrimination, to provide ‘legal identification to all residents — not just citizens’. 105 This is a good principle. However, the commitment does not address the fact that universal coverage of identity documents that record legal status in the country is not at all empowering for those who fail whatever tests are imposed and are issued an identity number or card as a non-citizen (especially, but not only, if no other citizenship is simultaneously confirmed). For those individuals previously treated as citizens in most contexts, a registration process that determines that they are not citizens — coupled with a new requirement to produce ID for all official transactions — may well be worse than a situation where a much larger group was marginalised for lack of an identity document (even if those who now have a ‘citizen’ ID benefit as intended). This is the perceived attraction of adult registration processes delinked from legal status. But even the Aadhaar register in India, which in principle could avoid these problems, has proved impossible to roll out in regions where legal status is particularly controversial, most of all in the north-eastern state of Assam. At the same time, less than one per cent of those enrolled in Aadhaar did not already have 102 ‘Illegal People’: Haitians and Dominico-Haitians in the Dominican Republic (Human Rights Watch Report Vol 14 No 1(B), Human Rights Watch April 2002); ‘Without Papers, I Am No One’: Stateless People in the Dominican Republic (Report, Amnesty International 2015); Eve Hayes De Kalaf, ‘Making Foreign: Legal Identity, Social Policy and the Contours of Belonging in the Contemporary Dominican Republic’ in Gibrán Cruz-Martínez (ed), Welfare and Social Protection in Contemporary Latin America (Routledge 2019) 99. 103 Munzoul AM Assal, ‘Struggles of Citizenship in Sudan’ in Engin F Isin and Peter Nyers (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (Routledge 2014) 196; Nationality and Statelessness in Sudan following the Secession of South Sudan (Draft Report Human Rights Centre University of Khartoum 2016) (on file with the author) . 104 See, eg, Shane Doyle, ‘Parish Baptism Registers, Vital Registration and Fixing Identities in Uganda’ in Breckenridge and Szreter (n 5) 277. 105 Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development: Toward the Digital Age (Principles, World Bank 2018) (‘Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development’) 8 <http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/213581486378184357/pdf/Principles-onidentification-for-sustainable-development-toward-the-digital-age.pdf>. 266