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Summary: According to Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, signatory governments are responsible for ensuring that systems are in place to register the births of all children. Yet the Committee on the Rights of the Child notes that provision for registration of all children at birth is still a ‘major challenge’ in many countries and regions. According to Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, signatory governments are responsible for ensuring that systems are in place to register the births of all children. Yet the Committee on the Rights of the Child notes that provision for registration of all children at birth is still a ‘major challenge’ in many countries and regions. Indeed, according to the latest UN estimates, around 48 million children annually are not registered at birth. As the lead agency for civil registration, the UN Statistical Office cooperates with the International Institute for Vital Registration and Statistics and a number of other organisations on birth registration. These include a wide range of UN agencies such as: the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF); the UN Population Fund (UNFPA); the UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO); the UN Development Programme (UNDP); the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR); the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) as well as a number of international nongovernmental organisations including Plan, Save the Children and World Vision. However, in the absence of clear and coordinated international leadership from the UN Statistical Office, these different stakeholders employ a mixture of approaches to their birth registration efforts and do not always work with each other and with national governments in a coordinated and strategic manner. Plan believes that it is time to agree a common agenda for birth registration in order to best harness these collective efforts. In mounting an effective global response to birth registration it will be necessary to work together in a creative and harmonised way under a framework of agreed international guidelines and strategies. The starting point for such an initiative can be found within the Concluding Observations and General Comments of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. These communicate to State parties the importance of birth registration within the Convention as a whole, provide guidance on the principles under which birth registration efforts should be implemented and suggest a number of strategies that will help to make the attainment of Universal Birth Registration (UBR) a reality. Further information
Owner: Nicola Sharp, Advocacy and Policy Advisor, Plan Internationalpdf: www.writemedown.org/pdfs/guidelinesubr.pdf