Children's best interests
The case also had serious implications for child rights. By denying my children the option of Botswanan citizenship simply because their mother married a foreigner, the law was denying them the full right to an effective nationality. And by mandating that they take their father's nationality, it ignored article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls for "the best interests of the child" to be a primary consideration in all actions concerning children. In 1996, before I became a judge, I brought a case that challenged Botswana's law stipulating that children born out of wedlock belong exclusively to their mothers, the other side of this coin being that fathers in such situations have limited, if any, responsibility for their children. As a result of this legal case, such children now have limited rights to support, but as of yet they have no right to inheritance or to have their father's name entered on their birth certificates. Thanks to the collective force of women's activism and the growing power of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), many patriarchal national laws have been rewritten in the past few years to give women the right to pass their nationality on to their children, as required by article 9 (see story). The issue of the nationality of a child born to parents from different countries is a particular concern when national laws treat men and women differently, such as some of those countries with legal systems based on Sharia, or Islamic law.
By providing information about the number of children in a country, birth registration helps governments plan services, such as schools. These youngsters attend school in a village in Turkmenistan, which has a birth registration rate of a least 90%. For instance, birth certificates in Jordan state both the father's and mother's nationality. However, Jordanian children are given the mother's nationality only if the father's cannot be legally identified. Women's human rights groups are now leading an effort to place Jordan's citizenship rules under secular law and grant women the right to pass on nationality to their children. Egypt's reservation to article 9 does not acknowledge the difficulties faced by children who become foreigners in their own country simply by being assigned their father's nationality. Rather, the reservation states: "It is clear that the child's acquisition of his father's nationality is the procedure most suitable for the child and that this does not infringe upon the principle of equality between men and women, since it is customary for a woman to agree, upon marrying an alien, that her children shall be of the father's nationality." Such an assumption violates not only women's rights but also children's right to citizenship. Making good on promises These are obstacles that commitment, technology and public information campaigns can, and must, overcome, and some nations have begun taking small steps towards doing so. Under the auspices of the UN Statistical Division and a consortium of UN agencies, training workshops have been held for registrars throughout the world during the past six years to improve civil registration systems. Registry offices are being strengthened and upgraded, and some are moving towards computerization. Public information campaigns have begun in a number of countries. More than 30 countries make extra efforts to reach children in rural areas. Travelling registrars issue birth certificates in, among others, Argentina, Ecuador, Iran, Thailand and Zimbabwe. Mozambique, in order to register children born during its civil conflict, began a mobile campaign shortly after the peace accord in 1992. Chile has a state-of-the-art mobile registration unit with a computer connection to the registry in the capital. In 1996, Romania passed a law obligating doctors to initiate the registration process for babies they deliver who are subsequently abandoned in the hospital. In the Philippines, as part of an effort to improve awareness, each February is designated as Civil Registration Month. A number of countries have health officials or registry staff begin the process right in the hospital, among them Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Myanmar, South Africa and Uruguay. To reach children born out of hospitals, traditional birth attendants in Ghana are being trained to register the babies they deliver. In Peru, judges, lawyers, registrars, educators and staff from grass-roots organizations have attended seminars on civil registration. In Ecuador, mobile brigades have been organized to register children in poor neighbourhoods, and Nicaragua has focused on migrants from rural areas and children from indigenous neighbourhoods. But these are isolated efforts and they are not enough -- as demonstrated by most nations' uncertainty about the percentage of registered births. Governments must provide the resources to develop registration systems, and citizens must continue to press their governments by challenging laws that discriminate against the child's right to a full nationality. Being registered at birth is the first step on life's path. For children denied a birth certificate, the path will be a rocky one. We must vow to make sure that every child born on earth has this precious birthright, a ticket to citizenship. I can think of no better commemoration of the 50th anniversary of that solemn promise to humanity, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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