SDG 16.9 specifically focuses on legal identity:
By 2030 provide legal identity for all including free birth registrations
That is part of a bigger goal set out in SDG 16
Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
And how does the target fit into the wider SDG 16? Well, an inclusive society is one which does not segregate or discriminate against a group or a minority by denying them legal recognition and the rights that go hand in hand with that legal recognition. Similarly, access to justice can be limited if your situation in a country is irregular, if you cannot prove your identity or your standing in court or when challenging a decision as an interested party. And access to justice ties into infrastructure that is accountable, inclusive and effective. If local infrastructures, like courts, tribunals and other means of dispute resolution are not accountable to you because, for all intents and purposes, you do not exist to them, or if they do not feature whole swathes of people when budget planning, then that inclusivity and that accountability quickly disappears.
SDG 16 is actually quite broad and includes indicators and sub-targets such as (16.1) to end abuse, exploitation and trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children, (16.3) to promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all and 16.B to promote and enforce non-discriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development.
SDG 16.9 is quite different from the other targets. It is much more specific and it has a deadline. It is one of the less obvious targets in the SDG group. We can see why the rule of law is a good thing, and non-discrimination too. Trafficking and exploitation are no one’s friend. But legal identity and free birth registrations? Does the indicator (SDG 16.9.1) help at all? According to the UN, the “proportion of children under 5 years of age whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age”.
So the target, the measurable target, is how many new births are registered. Although SDG 16.9 talks about a legal identity for all, the focus is on children and new birth registrations. This is, no doubt, because resolving past wrongs, leaving people stateless, denying them the right to identity documents and to full civil participation is harder to untangle and to neatly resolve. And legal identity is of course about more than simply birth registration. It can be about nationality, it can be about evidencing where you live, where you are entitled to use services, where you can vote. Being in a possession of a birth certificate may not be a solution to those issues.
And of course we have to consider the link between proof of legal identity and the possibility for misuse of the need for proof that can be built into many systems. Where the main driver for building systems that help residents or citizens to have a legal identity, such as ID card roll-outs or birth registrations, is to ensure that individuals have proof of identity, this can have the opposite effect to the aims of SDG 16.9 – it can leave many of those without proof excluded from the right to have rights and from access from the very services which the state should be providing. Alen Gelb and Bronwen Manby provide a brief but very eloquent overview on this issue and the interplay with SDG 16.9 at https://www.cgdev.org/blog/has-development-converged-human-rights-implications-legal-identity-sdg
But perhaps too there is a hope in this indicator. One of the main by-products of past wrongs is that they do not stay in the past, but affect new generations too. In many cases children, because of who their parents are, or because their parents do not have a recognised legal identity, are also denied a legal identity and the rights that come with it. So perhaps, an indicator that focuses on new births and birth registrations means a break from past wrongs and a fresh start for many children around the world. This is not to negate the past wrongs, or to ignore the fact that they too need redress. Rather to take the time to look forward and to step by step create conditions where legal rights and identity rights cannot be denied to future generations the way that they have been in the past.
