Part of the conference’s mission was to move forward with plans to eliminate birth under-registration by 2015,

(UNICEF) United Nations Children’s Fund, said that in recent years, there has been important progress in the Caribbean and the Latin American region on the right to an identity and birth registration.

Representative of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Panama, Mr. Tomaz Bermudez revealed, that some 1.3 million births are not registered officially each year. He added that Overall there are 6.5 million children without birth certificates, a number equal to the combined populations of Uruguay and Panama.

“Countries that do not have universal birth registration, lack information and vital statistics for developing programs and adequate public policies for poverty reduction. The IDB has invested more than US$100 million to strengthen the civil registries and promote the universal registration of births,” said the IDB’s Representative in Panama, Tomas Bermudez.

He went on to say “Important impediments frustrate the registration of the births of all children, and in some cases make it impossible. Examples of such barriers are geographic location, with families living in rural areas often lacking access to registration services; lack of budgets for civil registries; parents’ lack of identity documents; civil registries that are insensitive to the cultures of indigenous populations or the migratory status of children or their parents; and the lack of information or awareness of the importance of civil registration among the general population.”

Regional Director of Plan International for Latin America, Mr. Roland Angerer said “The barriers facing the last 10 percent will not be so easy to overcome, especially because these barriers are related to the dynamics of discrimination and exclusion. That is why all the strategies that we may propose these days to address the problem will have to begin with two basic human rights principles: the universal scope of human rights, and non-discrimination in their application.

OAS Representative in Panama, Ambassador Abigail Castro, said the link between the struggle against under-registration and the Millennium Development Goals is clear. “Access to identity is a necessary condition to enjoy rights and services that help our citizens overcome the conditions of exclusion that lead to poverty, therefore, if we improve registration rates in the region, we will come closer to meeting the eight ‘MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS’ (MDGs),”.

The first Conference was held in Asunción, Paraguay, in 2007.