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UNHCR issues birth certificates to Afghan refugees

February 04, 2004

BARKALI REFUGEE CAMP, Pakistan (UNHCR) - The UN Refugee Agency has extended a programme to issue birth certificates into Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, giving newborn Afghan refugees a document that protects their nationality and is required by international agreements.

The programme, which was pioneered in Pakistan by the Balochistan office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, aims to issue birth certificates to all children born in the future in the refugee camps that were set up to host the 300,000 Afghans who fled war in Afghanistan in 2001. Birth certificates are necessary in many countries to obtain education or medical care, and establish inheritance or the right to property. Crucially, it allows a person to prove his nationality - in the most extreme cases the lack of a birth certificate could result in a person being declared stateless.

One-week-old Mustafa goes through the procedures to receive a birth certificate, the centre of a public ceremony to inaugurate the new UNHCR programme in NWFP © UNHCR/J.Redden

"It is extremely important for every child to have a birth certificate; this is the reason we are making a big event of this," Masti Notz, head of the UN Refugee Agency office in Peshawar, told dignitaries and hundreds of refugees who assembled for the start of the programme in Barkali Refugee Camp.

"All your children will have something resembling an ID card which they can use if they go back to Afghanistan or if they stay in Pakistan" she said.

The new document records the baby's name and gender, date and place of birth, the father's name and place of origin. It is signed by the UN Refugee Agency and PDH, an organisation linked to the Pakistan government's Commissionerate of Refugees that provides medical services under an agreement with UNHCR.

In addition, the Peshawar Consulate of the Interim Government of Afghanistan has agreed to endorse these new certificates of refugees who decide to return to their homeland.

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by 192 countries, requires that all children be registered immediately after birth and have the right to a nationality.

Official support for the new programme was demonstrated by representatives of both the Pakistani and Afghan governments attending the launch ceremony in Barkali, a refugee camp of nearly 5,000 people in Bajaur Agency in the rugged Tribal Area along the Afghan border.

Initially the programme will issue birth certificates only to those born over the past year in the refugee camps that were established for those fleeing the 2001 war that unseated the Taliban regime. So far about 200 have been issued in Barkali, while nearly 3,000 have been distributed in Balochistan. It is uncertain whether UNHCR in Pakistan will have the resources to extend the programme to the old camps or to cover any child born before 2003. Issuing birth certificates to children of Afghan refugees born outside Pakistan's refugee camps would be even more difficult.

Two-month old Farhat gets his birth certificate © UNHCR/J.Redden

The number of Afghan children, like the total refugees resident in Pakistan, has never been well documented. While UNHCR estimates there are now about 1.1 million refugees in the 200 refugee camps scattered in Pakistan, the number elsewhere in the country is unknown.

The number of Afghan refugee children born in Pakistan since the crisis began a quarter century ago may number in the millions. Afghan refugees have one of the highest rates of population growth in the world, estimated at more than four percent a year. That would add more than 40,000 children for each million refugees every year - and the refugee population was several million throughout the 1980s and 1990s.