<<Print>>

Ms Emmanuelle Mitte, Senior Regional Protection Officer, UNHCR, Senegal, has cited ineffective civil or birth registration and documentation systems as one of the major causes of statelessness in West Africa. Liberia has the least birth registration of an average of four per cent annually. Statelessness refers to the condition of an individual who is not considered as a national by any state under the operations of its laws. �The birth certificate is an essential, indeed primordial tool to establish an individual�s identity as the right to birth registration is enshrined in the Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and the lack, thereof, is a severe obstacle to the establishment of one�s nationality,� she said. Ms Mitte was speaking on Thursday during a two-day workshop on statelessness in Saly for 30 journalists drawn from all the West African countries with the exception of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. She said birth registration was critically low in rural areas, where in general no specific or realistic arrangement had been made for nomadic populations or populations residing in remote areas to register. She said most of the civil registries were not computerized in most West African states with inadequate storage conditions leading to the destruction of such record over time. �In some cases, civil status records have been damaged during wars and crises that affected certain countries in the region,� she said. According to her, the poor functioning of public services during conflicts prevented children from being registered, as a result of which birth registration rates declined dramatically. Ms Mitte said populations in exile also systematically failed to register births in the country of asylum, resulting in the statelessness of their children. �For instance, children born to Ivorian refugees in exile in Liberia typically were not registered at birth and they are likely to face problems when they return to their country of nationality, as they lack documents to prove their identity,� she said. She said: �Although Cote d�Ivoire has put in place mechanisms for late birth registration, they only apply to births that occurred on its territory�. Ms. Mitte mentioned migration as another issue which posed a risk of statelessness especially when migrants ruptured their links with their countries of origin or lost all records and evidence of their nationality. �Or it can also be a rupture by virtue of the law of the country of origin, where it provides for withdrawal of nationality on account of residence abroad,� she said. She mentioned the Gambia, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone as countries in the sub-region that could withdraw one�s nationality on the account of residing abroad, and under some specific circumstances. Ms Mitte said in some cases, procedures had been put in place for the retention of nationality following emigration through registration at the embassy of the country of nationality located in the new country of residence. �However, these legal requirements are not always known to the migrants and there might well be situations in which there is no consular representation available in the country of immigration,� she said. Ms Nora Sturm, Associate Public Information Officer, UNHCR, Cote d�Ivoire, educated journalists on the modalities in doing stories on stateless people.