Children's rights to nationality

A child's right to acquire a nationality is evident in the Convention on the Rights of the Child—the main United Nations treaty governing states' human rights obligations towards children. But the way states are supposed to interpret and implement that right is unclear.

In this document, the Open Society Justice Initiative urges the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child—the body that interprets the Convention—to issue a General Comment. The comment would clarify and emphasize the obligation that governments bear for stateless children and would raise the profile of the issue in high-level discussion.

See also:
Children and statelessness - questions and answers

CRIN's Editorial on children's statelessness

Undocumented Children - Children's right to identity

This Is Who I Am is a project for recognizing the identity of vulnerable children - touching upon the core of children's citizenship rights.

If you loose your passport, identity document, birth certificate…

How do you prove who you are?

Millions of children worldwide are unregistred - and as a result stateless:
Without nationality or identity they are not included in official statistics - they basically do not exist and do not have any protection.

This Is Who I Am is an ambitious project aimed at providing children who are unregistred with an identity, proof that they do exist, that they do have a background, a history.




Knowing Children will soon put up a website that provides further information and ways to scale up the project to recognize the identity of undocumented children.