According to UNICEF, around 230 million children under the age of five worldwide (approximately one in every three) have never been recorded. Large differences can be found in the coverage of birth registration among regions. Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CEE/CIS) has the highest level of birth registration, with 98 percent of children under five registered. This is followed by Latin-America and the Caribbean, at 92 percent, and the Middle East and North Africa, at 87 percent. With a much wider gap, South Asia has only 65 percent birth registration.
Such a large number of unregistered children in South Asia and other places means these children have not been granted formal recognition by any state. According to UNICEF’s global database of birth registration (2014), Pakistan’s birth registration stands at 34 percent. It is the third lowest in South Asia after Afghanistan and Bangladesh having 37 percent and 31 percent birth registration respectively. Among the better performers in South Asia, Bhutan has 100 percent birth registration followed by Sri Lanka (97 percent), Maldives (93 percent), India (84 percent) and Nepal (42 percent).
Birth registration is the official recording of the birth of a child by some administrative level of the state and coordinated by a particular branch of government. Birth registration is important because it establishes the existence of a child under law and provides the foundation for safeguarding many of the child’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
Lack of formal recognition means their access to health, education, the criminal justice system and other state services are not guaranteed. At the international level, universal birth registration is also part of a system of vital statistics, which is essential for sound economic and social planning in any country. Birth registration is therefore not only a fundamental human right in itself but holds the key to facilitating the fulfilment of other rights. For instance, it enables access to legal protection instruments such as legislation on minimum ages, including for child labour, child recruitment and child marriage, and children in conflict with law. Birth registration helps in preventing statelessness by facilitating the acquisition of nationality by birth or descent through documenting the relationship between the child, his or her parents and place of birth.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) specifies that every child has the right to be registered at birth without any discrimination. Unregistered births are a violation of children’s inalienable human right to be given an identity at birth and to be regarded as part of a society. Article 7 of the Child Rights Convention (CRC), 1989 gives every child the right to be registered at birth by the state within whose jurisdiction the child is born. This means the state must make registration accessible and available to all children.
Pakistan is a signatory to the United Nations CRC. Multiple legislative and administrative arrangements exist but still three million children are not registered every year in Pakistan. Since the creation of Pakistan, a universal birth registration system has never been fully implemented enabling government functionaries to frequently overlook their own rules requiring proof of birth to access to different services for example school enrollment. The registration of births, under the Constitution of Pakistan, is the responsibility of the provincial and local governments. This system was, to a certain extent, on the ground before the country came into being in 1947. Later, after independence, the government introduced multiple legislations and administrative systems for birth registration. There are multiple administrative arrangements in different provinces for birth registration. However, across the country, union councils and the National Documentation and Registration Authority are integral to birth registration and certification.
The union council is the state’s lowest tier of administration. It is the frontline of the state where citizens come into contact and experience quality of governance in their immediate neighbourhood. By virtue of my engagement with secretaries of union councils of a province and its local government representatives earlier this year, I realised serious issues with infrastructure, technical capacity and financial resources faced by the first/lowest tier of the state with reference to the issue of low birth registration in Pakistan.
To improve birth registration rates in Pakistan, legislative and administrative arrangements need to be realigned to make birth registration functions multi-stakeholder featuring partnerships, coordination, accountabilities, innovative technology use, integration with civil registration and development planning. Also, the capacities of stakeholders need to be increased to develop and implement community education and awareness programmes to improve the understanding of significance of birth registration and its processes.
The author has research interests in social development issues. He is based in COMSATS Institute of Information Technology Islamabad and can be reached at [email protected]