Legal identity and why it matters

The United Nations defines legal identity as the basic characteristics of a human person’s existence. This includes aspects such as their name, sex, place and date of birth given to them through birth registration for which a birth certificate is issued by an authorized government body, or any other legally recognized institution saddled with that responsibility. In most cases, a birth certificate is the foundation for establishing legal identity credentials such as national ID cards, driver’s licenses and passports.

Legal identity, sometimes referred to as “foundational identity,” taps its essence from some provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (effective 1976), as well as many other international human rights agreements and conventions.

So important is legal ID that Target 16.9 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 16.9) urges countries of the world to provide legal identity to all citizens, including birth registration, by 2030.

As part of efforts to attain this goal, an initiative dubbed the UN Legal Identity Agenda Task Force was established in 2018 as a support mechanism for UN member countries to march towards this objective.

These and many other actions taken in this regard have flashed the light on the undeniable importance of legal identity, without which a human person doesn’t as much as exist in the eyes of their country’s government. To say that the number of people who lack proof of identity in the world is worrying is not an exaggeration.

Per recent estimates by the World Bank’s Identity for Development (ID4D) initiative, around 850 million people lack an official ID today, with a majority of them found in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

This explains why over the years, there have been various initiatives such as the International ID Day campaign fronted by identity movement ID4Africa to emphasize the wholistic importance of identity and why invisibility must be vociferously fought and defeated.

ID4Africa Executive Chairman Dr. Joseph Atick told Biometric Update in an interview in May that Africa’s voice on identity matters is getting louder by the day, meaning more and more countries are seeing the intrinsic need to strengthen and modernize their identity systems.

The progress toward SDG 16.9 notwithstanding, it remains clear that a lot more work has to be done to ensure that governments issue legal identity to all their citizens in line with that goal, given that legal identity is a requirement to access some of the most important services government or the private sector can offer.

Digital identity to practically benefit from legal ID

Closely linked to legal identity is digital identity which has now become a centrality in digital transformation discourses around the world. Digital identity is simply the identity attributes of a person, company or organization rendered in electronic format. For persons, it has to do with biographical and or biometric data which are all connatural characteristics.

Digital identity, as it relates to persons, is extremely vital, according to the ID4D. So vital it is that the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and other international development organizations consider it as an indispensable building block in the digital public infrastructure (DPI) ecosystem because it acts as a means of identifying or authenticating persons in online and offline situations. The other two components of DPI are a digital payments system and a data exchange platform.

Now, the UNDP talks of “legal digital identity” (a combination of both notions) as a tool to streamline and facilitate access to a wide spectrum of sectors such as financial services, healthcare, education, among others.

This is the case in Namibia, for example, where an accelerator lab program implemented by the UNDP is helping many citizens access basic services using legal digital identity. Legal digital ID is also said to be vital in the response to the climate and anergy crisis the world is currently facing.

Above all, given that legal and digital ID are indispensable in every country’s economic development agenda, governments, private sector partners, international development organizations and other shareholders along the chain, must step up their game, put in place the right legal and governance frameworks, and work in a more collaborative manner in order to make identity a veritable driving force of digital transformation.

Article Topics

birth registration  |  civil registration  |  digital identity  |  digital public infrastructure  |  human rights  |  International Identity Day  |  legal identity  |  SDG 16.9  |  UNDP  |  United Nations