SOLVING STATELESSNESS Mauritania47 and Myanmar.48 Promoting international standards on non-discrimination, the right to nationality and the prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of nationality is therefore critical to preventing and resolving situations of statelessness, and Target 10.3 could bolster these efforts. SDG 16, Target 16.9 (By 2030, provide49 legal identity for all, including birth registration) is relevant to the prevention and reduction of statelessness through the provision of birth registration and, in certain cases, nationality documentation, which are both forms of proof of legal identity.50 More than 230 million children around the world have not 47 48 49 50 on their face, the impact of these decisions has overwhelmingly impacted Dominican-born individuals of Haitian descent, in a context where race has long been a cause of tension and conflict. In the late 1980s, tens of thousands of such Mauritanians of sub-Saharan descent were expelled from their homes on the basis that they were not truly citizens due to their skin colour. The exclusion of more than a million Rohingya from Myanmarese citizenship stems from the ethnic discrimination contained in the 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law and the way in which it is applied. It should be noted that the word “provide” in SDG 16, Target 16.9, implies that the Target is concerned with the registration and/or documentation of legal identity, rather than legal identity itself. For more on the differences between “identity”, “registration” and “documentation” see, M. Brewer, N. Menzies and J. Schott, Making identification systems work for the bottom 40%, Just Development, World Bank, 2015. Although a universal definition of legal identity does not exist, the meaning and scope of the concept can, to an extent, be established through the examination of provisions of relevant international human rights instruments which guarantee legal identity. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is established that everyone has the right to be recognised before the law, and that all are equal before the law and entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law (Articles 6 and 7). Widely ratified international treaties such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child also guarantee the child’s right to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognised by law without unlawful interference (Article 8). One recent proposal for a definition of the concept of legal identity is, “the recognition of a person’s existence before the law, facilitating the realisation of specific rights and corresponding duties,” in L. González López, et al. “Civil registration, human rights, and social protection in Asia and the Pacific”, Asia-Pacific Population Journal 2015, Vol. 29(1). It should be noted that legal identity exists whether or not it is recognised by a State. For example, in many jurisdictions a person who is arrested on suspicion of committing a crime has rights that attach to their identity as a criminal suspect (for example, the right to remain silent). These rights are inherent to their identity as a 57