New civil registration law refocuses Cameroon’s push for SDG 16.9 legal ID target

Ornela Ndip is a 25-year-old internally displaced person (IDP) who fled her hometown of Kembong, Manyu Division, South West Region of Cameroon, in 2020. In the process of escaping violence unleased by separatist fighters, and in some instances, government forces, Ndip lost all her important identification papers such as her birth certificate, national ID card and even her High School exam certificate.
She tells Biometric Update of the hellish experience she went through to be able to re-establish a birth certificate, which was among the vital documents she lost while fleeing the armed conflict.
For a reminder, the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon (the North West and South West) have been trapped in a vicious armed conflict since 2018, as government forces have been battling armed militia men who are fighting for the creation of a new state they refer to as Ambazonia. The conflict has led not only to the killing of at least 6,000 civilians, millions of others have escaped from their original settlements to other parts of the country to seek safety, with many of them losing property and other important personal documentation in the process.
“Once my birth certificate was missing, I couldn’t do anything meaningful without it. So, I had to go back to Mamfe to follow up the legal procedure to have a new one established for me,” Ndip, who works in a restaurant in Yaounde, explains. Mamfe is the divisional headquarters of Manyu Division and is the seat of the Manyu High Court.
“The day I was travelling to Mamfe for this purpose, I almost lost my life in a crossfire between government soldiers and armed militia fighters along the Kumba-Mamfe road,” she says. This risk of losing her life was on top of the huge expenses she incurred having to travel back to her divisional headquarters to have the legal documents necessary for the re-establishment of a birth certificate.
Ndip tells me she hopes other IDPs who have lost their important identity documents such as birth certificates will henceforth be spared the ordeal she went through. She is referring to the new law organizing the civil registration sector in Cameroon which the President of the Republic, Paul Biya, enacted on December 23, 2024.
The legislation, which is made up of 130 Sections, introduces significant changes to Cameroon’s civil registration landscape and refocuses the mandate of the National Civil Registration Office (BUNEC) – the government agency responsible for civil registration matters, and also broadens its operational scope.
The law comes with a litany of novelties which are tailored to enable the country advance its push towards foundational and legal identity for all, especially at a time when the government says it is hoping to take the nation into a fully digital economy by 2030. The government has also posited that the new law sets the country on the right rails towards achieving the goal mentioned in the UN SGDs target 16.9 which calls for legal identity for all, including birth registration by 2030.
Among the novelties contained in the law are provisions that make it possible for IDPs to easily have their lost birth certificates re-issued, without having to travel to the high court with jurisdiction over the location where the lost document was originally issued. This was the case with the previous dispensation as provided for by the 1981 Civil Status Registration Ordinance, as amended by Law No. 2011/011 of May 6, 2011.
With the new law, an IDP living in Yaounde whose lost birth certificate was issued in the town of Bamenda, for example, will be able to obtain a new certificate in Yaounde without having to travel back to Bamenda.
Hon Donald Malomba Esembe, Vice President of the Constitutional Laws Committee of Cameroon’s National Assembly, which scrutinised and adopted the bill (now law), explains the pertinence of this provision. He notes that the new dispensation only requires the IDP to seize the State Counsel (government attorney) of the town of residence, and everything else will fall in order.
Easier ride for IDPs to obtain birth certificates
“This [law] stands out as an impactful and people-centered law. You know, every country uses an administrative system of civil registration to record vital events, deaths, marriages, and deaths. And this speaks to the fact that civil registration is the foundation of identity and citizenship,” Malomba, who is also a magistrate, says.
“Until now, an IDP who wanted to reconstitute a civil status document, say a birth certificate which got lost or got burnt because of the crisis or natural disaster, or in the course of trying to find refuge elsewhere, had to, while in his place of resettlement, go back to the court or State Counsel in the place where he/she escaped or ran away from, for reconstitution,” he narrates.
“In the new dispensation, such a person can now seize the State Counsel of the place where he/she has settled. So, if, for instance, you had to flee from somewhere in the East Region of Cameroon, and you settled in Buea, my constituency in the South West, you wouldn’t have to go back to the state Council in Batouri or Yokadouma [cities in the East Region]. You will simply apply to the State Counsel in Buea where you are residing at that time, and the documents will be re-issued to you.”
Digital rights activists and even government officials working in the civil registration domain say facilitating the process of IDPs obtaining lost identity documents like birth certificates could not come at a better time. Many of the IDPs who have taken up residence in different parts of the country have been trying to settle and restart their lives. For lack of birth certificates or ID cards, many of them cannot engage in certain businesses which require legal agreements. In other instances, many of them fled with their children of school-going ages who require birth certificates in order to secure admission into new schools, and to register for the First School Leaving Certificate Examination.
Walter Ndzerem, regional representative of BUNEC for the South West – one of the two English-speaking regions hit by the armed conflict – says this aspect of the law is significant, and is a major step in the right direction.
“It will help solve many problems that we have been having on the field. You know the prevailing crisis situation that we have in the southwest. The law has come in to take care of people who have displaced themselves from their original places of residence or their hometowns,” says Ndzerem.
“With this law, IDPs can register their life events in their host community, following a requisition by the State Counsel. Therefore, the difficulty of always having to go back to their places of birth, which they ran away from because of insecurity, has been dealt with.”
This situation, Ndzerem says has proven problematic, leading to many cases of double identity. “This has led us to having a lot of fraudulent declarations of information for civil status documentation. We have had cases of people changing their places of birth just because they couldn’t go back to places where they were displaced from to get a new birth certificate as the law required.”
Apart from the case of IDPs losing their civil registration certificates, Malomba explains that in the previous dispensation, it was generally difficult for all citizens to obtain a subsequent copy of a civil registration certificate in the case of a loss or an error. But the new law eases that burden.
“It was difficult to have a civil status document re-issued or to have a material error corrected. If you were to misplace your birth certificate today and you want it to be redone, it has been very cumbersome till now because the law said that could only be done via a court order, to reconstitute or to get a rectification of some material error. There had to be a judicial decision,” he says.
“This ordeal will no longer exist with the new law. Its Section 62 provides that you can now use the duplicate of your certificate, which can be gotten from its stub at the civil registration centre where it was initially done. The duplicate of that stub signed by the civil status registration officer, say the mayor or his deputy, will be enough proof for you to have your document reconstituted. This speaks of efficiency.”
Extended deadline for parents to register children’s births
Apart from this aspect, the new law also contains many other innovations which are aimed at expediting the process of civil status registration, notably births and deaths.
One other innovation is an extended birth registration deadline which has now moved from 60 to 90 days. The idea is to allow a longer time-span for parents to beat certain hurdles to be able to declare and register the births of their children. A national forum of Cameroon mayors, which took place in April last year, to discuss civil registration challenges in Cameroon, had made a proposal for this deadline extension in a charter adopted at the close of the two-day event.
In the past few years, Cameroon has faced several challenges with its civil status registration system which has resulted in at least seven million citizens not having a birth certificate. Many of these persons are children, thousands of who are of school-going age.
“Until now, it was 60 days from the day of birth for the parents, guardians or those who have an interest to make the declaration. This extension to 90 days is of course to permit that many, many, many more births are declared,” says Malomba.
Another key point highlighted is the aspect of the law which provides for the creation of birth registration centers in health facilities, as a way of bringing birth registration cervices closer to parents.
“Previously, health facilities did not have civil registration centres. Some of the children that were born in these health facilities were taken away without any birth declarations made. For many, their parents do not bother to make such declarations, often defaulting on the deadline and increasing requests for declaratory judgements which is has been a cumbersome process,” says Ndzerem.
“The new law has come to solve this problem by allowing civil status offices to be created in health facilities to take care of births that occur there. This will greatly reduce the high rate of non-registration of births and deaths occurring in those health facilities. Also, these health facilities will be linked to the civil status registry, which makes it possible for a civil status registrar to sign a birth certificate at the level of a civil registration center of a health facility,” the official adds.
Malomba corroborates: “With registration offices in these hospitals, you can imagine that this is going to facilitate the early or, if not, immediate capture, especially of births, which will be recorded. And with a digital system, we are sure that issues, especially pertaining to fraud and to late registration of births, are going to be significantly curtailed.”
“In some way, this solves the problem of the length of time that was hitherto taken to produce a civil status document.”
In line with the desire to further facilitate the obtention of birth certificates, the law allows the possibility of civil administrators and government representatives (Divisional Officers) at the level of subdivisions to make requests for birth certificate issuance for cases not declared within the statutory 90 days provided for by the law.
“The law provides that for places which are far away from the headquarters of the High Court or the hosting area of the court, the Divisional Officer (DO) can issue requisitions to help people in those localities have their civil status documents issued. For example, somebody in Idenau [a small town in the city of Limbe without a court] will be able to have their civil status document because the DO is closer to them than the court. The DO makes the requisition for a birth certificate and thereafter informs the State Counsel of his action,” Ndzerem explains.
Malomba adds that the law mentions that if a birth has not been declared within a period of 12 months from birth, there are authorities who can request for it to be done. This innovation, he says, goes beyond DOs and allows heads of civil society organisations that deal with children’s welfare, heads of social welfare government structures, as well as traditional rulers, to exercise this responsibility.
Issuance of UPIN, digital certificates
Other notable innovations in the Cameroon law include provisions for the assignment of a Unique Personal Identification Number (UPIN) which an individual shall use throughout their life; the introduction of digital civil registration certificates which shall have the same legal and evidential value as physical ones; the issuance of bilingual civil registration certificates in line with the country’s official bilingual status; strong anti-corruption measures with emphasis on the criminalization of extortion and other forms of corruption in the civil status registration system, as well as the putting in place of a sustainable financing model to fund civil registration operations.
The UPIN, Ndzerem says, is critical. “This Unique Personal Identification Number takes you right from the birth certificate to every other document that comes thereafter. So, it is in line with government’s legal identity agenda because what gives a legal identity is a birth certificate. Without a birth certificate, we don’t have an identity, we don’t have affiliation, we cannot have a nationality. In fact, we are stateless,” he opines.
“Some people are asking the question: what about those who have their ID cards already without that Unique Personal Identification Number? The new law tells us very clearly that within the digitization process of the civil registration system, we are going to subsequently attribute these numbers to citizens who already have birth certificates and ID cards.”
Going by the law, many of the novelties and procedures explained above which pattern to birth registration and issuance of birth corticates, also apply to death registration, which the legislation emphasizes is mandatory. Officials say with these, it is possible that death registration which has a generally very low rate in the country – currently around 10 percent according to BUNEC – will hopefully improve in the years to come.
Emphasis on the fight against corruption
One of the problems which have plagued Cameroon’s civil registration system over the years and prevented thousands of people from acquiring civil status registration certificates is corruption.
There have been reports of civil status registration personnel extorting huge sums of money from poor citizens, something that in 2023, prompted a campaign from a government agency in the North West Region of the country.
The new law emphasizes criminal and administrative sanctions against all those who will ask for bribes or favors to register births, deaths or marriages.
“I will assure you that this is one of the aspects that MPs were very concerned about to have in the law, and of course, it came from government itself and it was adopted. Sanctions are provided for as a way of ensuring the efficiency and enforceability of the law. The last but one part of the bill, Chapter nine, is exclusively about sanctions,” says Malomba. He adds that the elaborate sanctions outlined in the law reflect the commitment of government and lawmakers to rebuilding public trust in the country’s civil registration system.
The first thing the law incriminates is acts of corruption, Malomba points out: “A civil status registration officer who will request or accept a gift or a promise in order to declare or to record a vital event will be liable to a punishment which is defined in the penal code. Anyone who will alter or falsify, whether in its substance or in the signature or dates, a civil status document like a birth certificate or a marriage certificate, is also amenable to prosecution and sanctions under the penal code.”
Although some of these sanctions are not entirely new, Ndzerem says elaborately spelling them out in the new law means “we are probably going to see examples of the law severely cracking down on perpetrators of these acts.”
Simon Tamfu Fai, the head of the government agency that initiated the anti-extortion campaign in the civil registration system in the North West Region of Cameroon, says he is happy that their campaign caught the attention of government to emphasize criminal penalties for corruption-related offenses.
“You know for sure that it is the North West out of the 10 regions that first cried out about extortion and the corruption in the civil registration system. We still have a lot of work to do because I don’t feel that the problem is completely solved, even if there’s very great improvement in the North West,” Fai told State radio CRTV in a Sunday morning program last month.
He said their campaign also included sensitizing Cameroonians on their rights and the importance of obtaining a birth certificate which is a vital tool needed to establish other important life documents. Fai expressed the hope that they’ll continue to sensitize the North West public about key aspects of the new civil registration law and the several important innovations that it comes with.
“We are going to keep talking to the people about this new law which comes at a very good time. You know that we have radio programmes and community-based assistance in all municipalities. So, we’re going to make sure that we sensitize the population to claim their rights as far as this law is concerned so that they should not get into situations where they are being cheated again.”
Law is no magic wand, concrete action required
While advocates say the law in itself will be no magic wand to the litany of problems which have bedevilled Cameroon’s civil registration sector for many decades, it is expected that its meticulous implementation is what will help propel the country’s legal identity push.
Many provisions of the law are already active following the promulgation by the President of the Republic last December, but others require specific instruments (mostly presidential decrees) for their activation. One of such provisions that require a separate instrument to activate is the aspect on issuance of digital birth, death and marriage certificates.
It is hoped that the activation of the currently dormant provisions will be done by the President sooner than later so that the legislation will effectively complement efforts already being implemented by the government to digitize the country’s civil registration system, a digitization process that is projected to be completed by 2029.
Article Topics
Africa | birth registration | Cameroon | civil registration | CRVS | digital ID | identity management | legal identity | SDG 16.9 | Unique Personal Identification Number (UPIN)
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