Birth Certificate
Sixty percent are located in the Asia-Pacific region. These children will be unprotected when it comes to defending their rights, such as the right to vote, access to education or healthcare. Refugees from ethnic minorities are some of the most vulnerable groups.
Some 230 million children worldwide lack a birth certificate, 60% of them in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the UN and the NGO Plan International. This leaves them unprotected and without access to fundamental rights such as voting, education and health care. Among the causes of this problem are geographic distance in rural areas, corruption, bureaucracy and lack of awareness of the benefits of the birth certificate.
In the Asia-Pacific region, 135 million children under the age of five are not legally registered. Some countries, such as India and Bangladesh, have committed to registering all newborns as part of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Other countries, such as Laos and Pakistan, also seek to achieve “universal registration”.
Ethnic minorities and refugees are particularly vulnerable, as without a birth certificate they cannot obtain nationality or return home, and face abuses such as incarceration in regular prisons. Examples of these minorities include the Rohingya and Moken in Burma and the Akha in Thailand. In addition, some states exclude these populations, making it difficult to solve the problem.
In November, Bangkok will host the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, organized by several UN agencies, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the NGO Plan, to address this issue.
