Tutu urges baby registration
2005-02-23 09:34
New York ? Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu urged world governments on Tuesday to make sure all newborn children were properly registered to guarantee their access to education.
About 48 million infants born every year are without birth certificates.
"It is actually a matter of life and death, because it gives access to education, to health care," said Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, speaking in front of UN headquarters.
Children that brought into the world without proper papers have difficulty getting access to education, health care and, later, have problems exercising their civil rights, according to an international children's organisation known as Plan.
"One size doesn't fit all," Tom Miller, president of the group, told AFP.
"In some countries, you can't even get an education without a birth certificate. In some countries, you can start an education but you cannot go further than the primary level. In some other countries, you can't get health care.
"In some countries, there is trafficking in kids. To prosecute the traffickers, you need to prove the age of the kids.
"And parents whose children go missing, during disasters like the tsunami, may even be unable to get help with tracing their sons or daughters because they cannot prove ... that their children even exist."
55% of African children not documented
According to a report released by the group, six out every 10 newborns in South Asia are not properly documented. In sub-Saharan Africa, their proportion reaches 55%.
It is impossible to give a precise estimate of the overall number of undocumented children in the world, but Plan believes their number should be somewhere about half a billion.
The group was founded in 1937 under the name Foster Parents Plan, but renamed as simply Plan in the 1990s. It is working in 40 countries to promote child registration.
In Cambodia, the group was able to register 1.5 million youngsters in just two months following the collapse of the Khmers Rouge regime.
A 1989 UN convention that was ratified by 192 government calls for giving all children proper birth certificates.