Every child belongs

When raising awareness of the importance of birth registration, organisations like Plan and UNICEF have done a good job of devising compelling slogans, like “Count every child” and “All children deserve to celebrate their birthday”. The message is that every child has the right to recognition of their existence and proof of the facts of their birth as provided through birth registration. This can be critically important for the enjoyment of all sorts of child rights, from protection against early marriage to access to childhood immunisations. These kinds of slogans have the power to portray the importance of what is really a rather dry and technical administrative act to a wide audience in just a few words. Impressive.

Last week I was in Geneva to help teach a specialised short course on Statelessness and Child Rights – a collaborative project of the Statelessness Programme of Tilburg University, UNHCR and UNICEF, piloted for the first time. While I was there, I spent quite a bit of time pondering whether and how we could adopt a similar technique to that above to communicate core messages around statelessness. Just as the human rights language “every child has the right to birth registration” has been translated into the demand to “Count every child”, can we turn the “right of every child to acquire a nationality” into a more meaningful call to action?

Unfortunately, many of those who work on statelessness – including myself – are lawyers by training, rather than communications or public information experts. Yet, as governments, UNHCR, other UN agencies and civil society groups start to engage on the issue more actively, knowledge of statelessness is quickly spreading beyond the lawyerly circles and other expertise is being brought in to operationalise policies to fight statelessness. So, no doubt we will start to see the emergence of increasingly sophisticated ‘marketing’ techniques and hopefully a simplification of the language around statelessness. Already, we see a move away from the message – sadly all too common in older publications – that “statelessness is a highly complex legal issue”. Because, quite frankly, birth registration is a highly complex legal, social, economic and sometimes political issue, but that’s not a particularly helpful way to introduce it to a new audience, which is why Plan and UNICEF have found a different approach.

The challenge then, is to work harder to explain statelessness, or at the very least the importance of fighting statelessness, in a way that any audience could understand and internalise it. This is a vital first step, because without some sense of what the problem is – and that it is a problem at all – no-one will be very motivated to invest the time to learn more about it or take action to address it. For this, we need to take a step back from the legal complexity and look at it from a more down to earth perspective.

One fact that I find particularly compelling and which was emphasised throughout the course on Statelessness and Child Rights is that, in any given year, the vast majority of new cases of statelessness are amongst children. Stateless parents are often powerless to prevent their plight from being transmitted to the next generation. If we are ever to crack this problem and realise the right to a nationality for all, we must stop this senseless spread of statelessness.

What’s more: children affected by statelessness did not choose to be outsiders. Nor do they somehow exist as free radicals without any attachments to a family, a community, a place or a home. They have the same connections as anyone else. They have a country. They belong. Yet their government is letting them down, right from the start, by failing to ensure that this belonging translates into a nationality – a legal bond which formalises their membership of the community and provides protection, rights, empowerment, a sense of acceptance and inclusion. As momentum grows to address statelessness and people from an increasingly diverse range of backgrounds and disciplines, with different skills to offer, join the cause, I hope that there will be a greater effort to distil these types of simple messages and that someone with the know-how to do so will translate them into clever and compelling slogans to help spread the word.

Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager, Statelessness Programme

[This blog was originally drafted for and posted on the website of the European Network on Statelessness, see www.statelessness.eu] 

To “do an Obama”

When digging up some extra teaching resources for a statelessness workshop in South Africa last week, my attention was drawn by a recent article in Zimbabwean newspaper The Standard, entitled “Zim birth threatens Banda’s second-term bid”. The piece was about accusations raised by political opponents, that Zambia’s current President, Rupiah Banda, is not in fact eligible for the presidency under the country’s own laws. For the Zambia’s top job, the Constitution requires not only that the presidential candidate is a citizen, but that both of his or her parents are also Zambian nationals. Banda’s opponents are now claiming that he is of Malawian parentage and the fact that he was born in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) has further fuelled allegations about his non-eligibility for the presidential office.

This case is compelling for a number of reasons, not least because it isn’t the first time that the citizenship and heritage of a Zambian president has been questioned. Indeed, in one of the most remarkable statelessness-related cases that I have come across, the Zambian High Court ruled that Kenneth Kaunda, described by the New York Times as the ‘father of modern Zambia’, was stateless. Although not in power at the time, Kaunda had previously ruled the country as president for 27 years. And it was when Kaunda announced plans to run against the governing party and re-claim the presidency, that his political opponents challenged his citizenship in court. Should the court agree that he is not a national of Zambia, then Kaunda would automatically be barred from making good on his ambitions to return to office. After noting that Kaunda had renounced his Malawian nationality years before, the High Court ruled that he was also not a citizen under Zambian law, thereby declaring him stateless. (The following year, however, the Supreme Court overruled this judgment and Kaunda’s Zambian citizenship was recognised)

These Zambian cases are a perfect illustration of the politicisation of nationality. Although not always featuring such prominent individuals, the questioning and even manipulation of citizenship for political ends is not uncommon. Nor is it a tactic monopolised by countries that have recently embraced multiparty democracy, which brings me to the title of this post. In the Zimbabwean newspaper article that I referred to earlier and which inspired this piece, Rupiah Banda was reportedly being urged by his opponents to literally “do an Obama”, i.e. to substantiate his citizenship and eligibility the Presidency by responding to claims about his origins and ancestry. Earlier this year, the White House released President Barack Obama’s official birth certificate in order to refute, once and for all, the allegation that he was not born on US soil. Conspiracy theorists and political opponents had been pushing the rumour that Obama was born in Indonesia or Kenya (and was thereby unqualified for office), causing it to persistently resurface in the press since the time of the Presidential campaign. Having decided that these rumours were becoming an unhealthy distraction from important political debate, Obama released his original birth certificate which establishes his birthplace as Hawaii.

As organisations like UNICEF and Plan International continue to point out and Obama has now very publicly illustrated, birth registration is of critical importance to the protection of a person’s rights, throughout their lifetime. A birth certificate provides evidence of key facts about an individual, which can be used to verify identity, nationality and even eligibility to hold Presidential office. Worldwide, the births of some 50 million children go unregistered each year. Unless this is addressed, these children will not be able to “do an Obama” and produce a birth certificate when asked to do so in later life – for instance in order to obtain an ID card or passport, or to sit school exams. Yes, high profile cases like Rupiah Banda’s and Barack Obama’s are fascinating to follow, steeped as they are in political intrigue and conspiracy. But let’s hope that the underlying message is also received loud and clear: whatever your (political) ambitions in life, birth registration is key to giving you a fair start and can continue to play a part in protecting a your identity and rights throughout your lifetime.

Find out more about the link between birth registration and statelessness in this UNHCR policy note. To follow developments in the push for Universal Birth Registration, supported by UNICEF and Plan International, visit their websites. In the Netherlands, Plan has also set up a special campaign, Babies For Babies, through which you can directly support birth registration efforts.

Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager, Statelessness Programme