‘Legal Identity for All’ and Statelessness Statelessness 2014–2024 mention the recording of other life events in a comprehensive civil registration system. 37 Registration of marriages (or civil partnerships), adoptions and guardianships, changes of name, divorces and other cessation of these statuses, and deaths, may be as critical to assert rights based on identity as birth registration. This includes the right to the nationality of a particular state. Birth in or out of wedlock — most often defined as a formally registered marriage — may create different rights for children to acquire nationality or to inherit property, dependent on the systems for recognition and registration of parentage. Care of a child without registration of a formal adoption or other legal relationship may leave the child rightless within the foster family, and if the child has origins in another country, also stateless. Registration of the death of a pre-deceased parent may be necessary for birth registration to take place, for the child’s nationality and other rights to be recognised, or for a spouse to claim a pension or other benefits. The problem with adopting a target for complete civil registration coverage is, first and foremost, the obvious unattainability of such a target in very many countries within the timeframe of the SDGs. But it is equally challenging to formulate an indicator that would accommodate the immense complexity of civil registration systems around the world. The definition of civil registration employed by the UN is clear that uniformity is indeed not expected across states: civil registration is defined as the continuous, permanent, compulsory and universal recording of the occurrence and characteristics of vital events pertaining to the population, as provided through decree or regulation in accordance with the legal requirements in each country. 38 What are these legal requirements? It is possible to start with the very general sorting of civil registration frameworks into civil and common law systems. Legal systems within the civil, or Romano-Germanic, legal tradition tend to be comfortable with comprehensive and centralised civil registration as the basis for recognition of legal capacity and status within the family: incorporating not only registration of births and deaths, but also adoptions, marriages, divorces and changes of name. The Nordic states are among those that have taken this approach the furthest, integrating civil registration into a national population register in which other family relationships are also recorded. 39 The common law systems found in Britain and its former colonies, however, tend historically to have managed official identity and interactions with the state through multiple registers 37 38 39 SDG indicator 17.19.2 includes the ‘proportion of countries that … (b) have achieved 100 per cent birth registration and 80 per cent death registration’. This indicator relates not to legal identity, however, but to Target 17.19 on statistical capacity-building, falling under SDG 17, on the need to ‘revitalize global partnerships for sustainable development’. See, ‘Sustainable Development Goal 17’, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform (Web Page, 2015) <https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg17>. See also Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014–2024 (Report, UNHCR 2014) action 7: Ensure birth registration for the prevention of statelessness’ <https://www.unhcr.org/enau/protection/statelessness/54621bf49/global-action-plan-end-statelessness-20142024.html>. Principles and Recommendations for a Vital Statistics System (n 36) 65 [279] (emphasis added). Ian Watson, ‘An Unusually Open Identification Number System: The Icelandic Kennitala’ in Ilsen About, James Brown and Gayle Lonergan (eds), Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) 132. 255