The Permanent Missions of Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire and Hungary to the United Nations, and UNICEF and the Rule of Law Unit on behalf of the UN Rule of Law Resource and Coordination Group (ROLCRG), organised a panel discussion on “Birth Registration: Passport to Protection” in New York on Thursday 21 May 2015.
The event provided an opportunity for Member States, UN entities and civil society to exchange knowledge, experiences and best practices on achieving universal birth registration. It also provided an opportunity to discuss and hear about progress on the implementation of the voluntary pledges on the rule of law, made on the occasion of the High Level Meeting of the General Assembly on the Rule of Law at the National and International Levels in September 2012.
H.E. Ambassador Zsolt Hetesy, Deputy Permanent Representative of Hungary to the United Nations spoke about the importance of legal identity and birth registration in the context of the Sustainable Development Agenda, as well as about the implementation of Hungary’s 2012 pledge to reform birth registration procedures.
Ambassador Hetesy outlined that the target of universal birth registration in Goal 16 of the SDG’s is one of the drivers and cross cutting targets of the agenda. He highlighted that without legal identity, an individual is left out from all three pillars of development and all of the 16 Goals. Birth registration is pivotal to access services, opportunities and inclusive development. In particular, he drew on his interactions with activists and entrepreneurs in his former capacity as Vice-President of the High-level Committee on South-South Cooperation to point out that birth registration is important for the realization of economic participation, and building on that, for political rights. It is essential to access education and work opportunities, to open a bank account, to register businesses, access loans and financial credits, as well as to own property. The lack of birth registration therefore compounds the vulnerability of those who are already most vulnerable in society. Ambassador Hetesy also emphasised that birth registration is crucial for improving the Government’s data on vital statistics, and for planning at the national level.
Ambassador Hetesy discussed the implementation of Hungary’s pledge “to simplify administrative procedures regarding birth registration and civil records”, made on the occasion of the High Level Meeting of the Rule of Law in 2012. To fulfil this goal Hungary had switched to a fully digitalised and centralised system of registration, trained registrars, and employed IT-systems to simplify registration procedures and records.
The aim of the Government of Hungary is to ensure that the birth of every child born alive in Hungary is registered. Some steps taken to that end include placing the primary onus to ensure registration on the director and staff members of medical institutions where the birth takes place, reducing the burden on parents. Hungary had also created the tool of “fictitious Parent” to allow children with unknown parents to be registered, and integrated the registration of birth to the processes of obtaining other documentation such as ID Cards, passports, social security and tax cards. As a result of these steps, the last case of an unregistered birth in Hungary had been a single occurrence in 2008. Ambassador Hetesy concluded by stating that some of Hungary’s key goals for the future included transferring all existing information on the paper based registers onto digital registers and combining the different forms of identification into one identification card.
