Headlines

RIGHTS: Lack of Birth Records Leaves Children Open to Predators

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 22 2005 (IPS) - When rebel leaders who recruit child soldiers are confronted by U.N. officials or human rights activists, they try to evade responsibility mostly by overstating the ages of rifle-toting children pressed into battle.
     The real ages of most child soldiers cannot be verified because they do not possess birth certificates.

When rebel leaders who recruit child soldiers are confronted by U.N. officials or human rights activists, they try to evade responsibility mostly by overstating the ages of rifle-toting children pressed into battle.

Every time you talk to a child soldier, he is invariably coached to say he is over 18 years old, Olara Otunnu, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, once told IPS.

Otunnu had just returned from northern Sri Lanka where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have gained worldwide notoriety for deploying thousands of underage child soldiers in its 20-year-old separatist war.

But neither U.N. officials nor human rights organisations are able to verify the real ages of most child soldiers because they do not possess birth certificates nor have they been registered at birth.

A new 50-page report titled "Universal Birth Registration: a Universal Responsibility" released here says no records exist of the birth of six out of every 10 babies born annually in South Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, 55 percent of all births go unrecorded every year.

"It is impossible to know how many unregistered children there are because they cannot be counted, yet best estimates put the number at more than half a billion," says the study released by a London-based non-governmental children’s agency, Plan (formerly Foster Parents Plan).

The global campaign for birth registration was launched Tuesday by Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu at U.N. headquarters in New York, where he called on governments to register the 48 million children whose births go unrecorded every year.

Asked about child soldiers, Colin McCallum of Plan told IPS that anyone recruiting underage soldiers – whether governments, rebels or militias – will find it easier if there is no available indication of their age.

The 1990 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which has been ratified by 192 states, set the legal minimum age for recruitment at 15.

But an "Optional Protocol" to the CRC, which came into force in February 2003, outlawed the involvement of children under 18 in any hostilities and sets strict standards for the recruitment of those under 18.

McCallum admitted that non-registration of births also distort global population figures. "The most immediate impact is at a local level where governments/local authorities planning services need an accurate population count," he said.

But they will not get the right population count because of the millions of children that go unregistered, McCallum added.

Article 7 of the CRC says that a child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name (and) the right to acquire a nationality.

But in reality this provision has not been fully implemented by some countries that are parties to the CRC.

The study says that it is difficult for unregistered children to prove their legal identity. "Unknown numbers of children orphaned by AIDS are being denied their right to inherit parental property because they do not have a birth certificate providing legal proof of their identity and family ties."

In some countries, a child without proof of citizenship will be denied access to vaccination programmes.

The denial of birth registration is also having an impact on child labour. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), there are about 246 million children involved in child labour worldwide.

"Birth registration can play an important role in combating child labour. Establishing a legal minimum age for work is clearly an important first step but, without an effective birth registration system to back it up, it is difficult for government agencies acting to eliminate such practices by confirming the age of the children concerned," the study notes.

In many countries, sexual relations with a girl under 16, with or without her consent, is regarded as rape. Yet without a birth certificate to confirm a girl’s age and to prove she is underage, it is hard to obtain a conviction.

The study cites a case in Nepal where police were unwilling to trace a girl known to have been trafficked across the border to a brothel in India because she had no birth certificate or means of identification.

"This meant that there was no proof of her age, nationality or even her existence. This is great cause for concern given that there are currently an estimated 200,000 women and girls missing from Nepal, believed to have been trafficked to India," the study says.

A survey of children in rural schools in Ghana found that many children – even literate ones – admitted that they did not know their age.

The study also cites the example of a child of nearly 18 years of age who was sentenced to death. But his lawyers failed in their attempts to get relief for him under the CRC because he could not prove his exact date of birth due to the absence of a birth certificate.