Legally Belonging in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Status of Legal Identity (Conference (Re)Imagining Belonging in Latin America and Beyond)

Abstract

The days that one could belong in their country without having a legal identity to actually be(long) legally in that country seem well behind us, except for minorities that have no other place to go than, perhaps, a refugee camp, or underground. “Leaving no one behind” — the motto of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda — is a hollow phrase until each and everyone one of us has a legal identity and basic rights for our interaction with governments. The Latin American and Caribbean region has arguably done the most to reach a state in which the proportion of those excluded from legal identity is down to a level very close to that in high-income countries, and lower than in any other part of the world. Birth registration coverage of children 0–4 years old is 96% (and higher still for children and youth 5–18 years old). ID-coverage is 95%. But this paper also shows that whether it is the World Bank (ID4D), the United Nations Statistics Division or UNICEF, their statistics on civil registration and national ID coverage leave much to be desired in terms of timeliness, coverage, veracity and compliance with adequate statistical practice. For a randomly chosen sample of seven countries in the LAC region we found that the World Bank’s “2018” dataset was in error to the extent that the actual number of “unidentified” people in those seven countries, by 2016, is just 15% of the World Bank number. All three actors release data that are, disappointingly, representative of the situation of 5 to 7 years ago. The World Bank, UNSD and UNICEF also treat high-income countries as VIP-countries that, “of course”, do not have people without a legal identity. Hence those countries are let off the hook and are not required to establish and report the problem of their “unidentified” people. “One UN” is not what we see either. That also applies to the tussle within the UN (including the World Bank Group) over what role “digital ID” systems could play for legal identity, if at all. The LAC region shows (to the extent available statistics allow) that, when it comes to legal identity, ID coverage tends to be, and become, more exclusionary than civil (=birth) registration coverage. The region also shows that universal coverage can be achieved, not by “leapfrogging” to eliminate “the identity gap” or “quack-fixes”, but by serious study and judicious policy and implementation. Much of this paper zooms in on the quantitative, empirical data on the regional coverage of civil registration and national ID-systems. The region deserves to be commended for the sophisticated-but-pragmatic, organization-focused research, and implementation follow-through largely with local resources. Reaching legal identity for all by 2030 in the LAC region is feasible.