Providing a “legal identity” for all “Even if the SGD 16.9 has reached 99% of the population affected, let us remember that the 1% that remain are some of the most vulnerable and most discriminated communities” Yasah Kimei, Nubian Rights Forum Speaking at the ISI World Conference on Statelessness in The Hague in June 2019, Yasah Kimei issued a warning about Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, which promises to provide legal identity for all, including birth registration. Sharing his reflections on the Kenyan context, Kimei reminds us that this goal can only serve its stated purpose of promoting peaceful and inclusive societies (SDG16), or facilitate progress towards other SDG targets, if priority is given in its implementation to leaving no-one behind. Otherwise, there is a real risk that structural exclusion will not be addressed. Those who were already the most marginalised will not be reached or will even see their marginalisation become further entrenched as the legal identity they are provided fails to guarantee full and equal access to rights and services. Kimei’s concerns resonate among minority groups in other countries across all regions of the world, including India, Serbia and the Dominican Republic. Their experiences shed important light on the broader challenges in the push for legal identity for all. As billions of dollars of investment are poured into “Identification for Development” (ID4D) initiatives and the promise of digital identity solutions creates a buzz of excitement, we must take this warning seriously. We should not lose sight of the driving purpose behind SDG16.9 as serving inclusiveness and reducing inequality. This policy brief draws on the experience of actors working on citizenship, statelessness and legal identity across different sectors and geographic contexts to set out why scrutinising the law and policy structures which determine legal identity is absolutely critical to making SDG16.9 work for the wider Sustainable Development Agenda. 2 While identification initiatives propelled by the push to “provide legal identity for all” are being rolled out all over the world, the lack of a (common approach to the) definition of legal identity leads to diverging programmatic priorities among key actors, who are free to interpret Target 16.9 to fit their own agendas. For example, governments may approach SDG 16.9 through a national security lens, prioritising control over certain groups that are seen as unwanted. Through such an approach, providing “legal identity for all” may actually become a tool to legitimise discrimination, reinforcing exclusionary practices already in place. The current situation in Assam, India, where millions of people risk being rendered stateless as a result of an identification exercise, serves as a caution. The administrative review of the legal identity of Assam’s population is fuelled in part by a genuine attempt to identify irregular immigrants in order to better allocate resources, but it is also driven by nationalism and discriminatory practice endorsed by the province’s authority. As a result, a bureaucratic process – seeking to ‘verify’ identity – is actually changing people’s legal identity, generating exclusion and leaving already marginalised groups even further behind. The birthregistration-focused SDG 16.9 indicator also does not allow for monitoring of a context such as Assam, where people of all ages are being deprived of an integral part of their legal identity – their citizenship. Furthermore, despite the underlying principle to leave no one behind, the SDG 16.9 indicator is not sufficiently nuanced to account for the impact of poor birth registration that disproportionately affects minorities, like in the case of Roma community in Serbia. There, “legal invisibility” is passed from generation to generation among these groups, leaving those who were already left behind not only unable to catch up, but actually falling further behind. While the Roma community constitutes only about 2-3% of the total population of Serbia, half of all unregistered children under the age of 5 in the country is Romani.* * Based on the data from the UNICEF MICS 2014 Serbia, UNICEF MICS 2014 Serbia (Roma Settlements), The World Bank and Serbia 2011 Census of Population.