A year ago, I wrote about why it is important for children in institutions to be allowed to celebrate their birthday (HERE). That it impacts their sense of self-worth and of identity if this is not allowed. Today, on another birthday of mine, I want to look at children who do not even have a birthday. They may not be aware of the date of their birth, or no one may be aware of it, because their birth was never registered.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates the right to having your birth registered. This may seem like an insignificant thing to a lot of people, after all whether registered or not, here I am. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Because children whose birth has not been registered are not visible to the authorities, in a sense ‘they do not exist’.
The government will not provide provisions or create services for those who are not counted when they look at the make up of the population in terms of people registered. In many situations, if you do not have a birth certificate – proof that you have been registered at birth – you may not be eligible for healthcare, education, employment, opening a bank account or government support.
Often the groups most in need of support, are the ones least likely to be registered at birth. These groups include: children with disabilities, children from an ethnic minority, and refugee children. Children who have been abandoned at birth and placed in an institution – or left to live in the hospital for years – often do not have their birth registered. Children who are born in a country where their parents were not born, often run into governments refusing to allow them to be registered, leaving the children not just without an offical date of birth, but also stateless – despite specific stipulation by the CRC that this is unacceptable. And parents belonging to an ethnic minority, trying to register their newborn baby, may find that they are not allowed to, because they themselves do not have a birth certificate, creating an ongoing generational problem.
Not having a registered birth, does not only affect access to services. It can also lead to prolonged, or permanent, separation of children from their families. Family tracing becomes much harder when there are no documents or registry to use to get information, leading to children being institutionalised or put in other forms of care, when it might not have been strictly necessary, if the information had been available.
Lack of birth registration also makes it easier to push aside or forget about difficult groups such as refugees living in camps and children living in institutions. When instead of a population registry, the government goes by the numbers that come out of a population census – where only people in households are taken into account – the result is that there is no apparent need to worry about anyone else. And it also becomes hard for outside organisations, trying to help, to find out who needs support and what kind of support is needed.
Having been born in the Netherlands, my birth was required to be registered within 24 hours of it taking place. That is how I know this is my birthday. And we all need to continue working to make sure all births are registered, giving everyone a birthday and an acknowledged existence.
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