Better registration of births would improve life chances of millions of children in Asia, now "legal ghosts"
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - More than 40 countries across Asia will pledge on Friday to improve the registration of births, deaths and marriages, a move that a charity said could improve the lives of 135 million "invisible" children.
World Vision said agreement on a decade-long framework to improve civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems could ensure tens of millions of undocumented children have access to education, healthcare and social services.
Undocumented children are at particular risk of becoming stateless, as without birth certificates they lack a key means of proving their nationality.
Stateless people are denied the rights and benefits most people take for granted. These "legal ghosts" often live in destitution and are at high risk of detention and exploitation, including slavery.
Abid Gulzar, director of Advocacy and Justice for Children in East Asia at World Vision, said the commitment of governments to improving their systems would ensure that "no child is left without an identity."
An estimated 250 to 500 million people around the world, at least 200 million of them children, remain legally invisible due to a lack of documentation, according to the children's charity.
"Existing government systems have not functioned properly, it's a widespread problem across Asia," Gulzar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from the Ministerial Conference on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics in Bangkok.
"We hope the framework will ensure that these previously invisible children have access to birth certificates, and will not be denied their basic human rights."
Governments in many developing countries across Asia cannot plan effectively for their people because they don't know how many there are or what they require, Gulzar added.
World Vision estimated that in Nepal, only 25 percent of the population were registered, while Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands could not provide statistics about their population because they had no working CRVS system.
Afghanistan, China, India, Indonesia, Iran and Myanmar are among the countries attending the conference, which started on Monday and ends on Friday.
Tim Costello, chief executive of World Vision Australia, said too many people remained unable to use essential government services due to a lack of documentation.
"Our vision is for a universal, free, legal identity system to make sure all newborns have legal identity documents," he said in a statement.
(Editing by Tim Pearce)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
