UNHCR extends birth certificate scheme to Afghan refugees

A programme pioneered by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the southwestern Pakistani province of Balochistan, which aims to issue birth certificates to all Afghan children born in refugee camps in Pakistan, has been extended to the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), according to an agency press release. “The birth certificates are being issued by UNHCR. They will be signed also by the [Pakistani government’s] Project Directorate for Health (PDH),” Jack Redden, the UNHCR spokesman, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. The new document records the baby’s name and gender, date and place of birth and the father’s name and place of origin, the press release said, adding that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that all children be registered immediately after birth and have the right to a nationality. Birth certificates are necessary in many countries to obtain education or medical care, and establish inheritance or the right to property, the statement continued. “It is extremely important for every child to have a birth certificate, this is the reason we’re making a big event of this,” Masti Notz, head of UNHCR in Peshawar, the provincial capital of the NWFP, told dignitaries and hundreds of refugees that had assembled at Barkali refugee camp on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. “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 added. 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 had been issued in Barkali, with nearly 3,000 distributed in Balochistan, the press release maintained. It was uncertain whether UNHCR in Pakistan would 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, it added. Redden admitted as much. “The numbers are going to be limited,” he said, referring to the programme’s limited outreach outside the camps. “We just don’t have the resources to start covering every Afghan child that’s born in Pakistan, or retroactively to start documenting the ones that have been born here over the last 25 years,” he stressed. The number of Afghan children, much as the total number of refugees resident in Pakistan, has never been documented. UNHCR estimates put 1.1 million refugees in the 200 camps scattered across Pakistan - the numbers elsewhere in the country are unknown, according to UNHCR. “Nobody knows exactly [how many refugees might be living elsewhere in Pakistan], but given a population growth rate of 4 percent, it could be a huge number of people,” Redden said. Pakistan continues to host one of the largest Afghan refugee populations in the world. Islamabad has reiterated its desire to help Afghans where possible but acknowledges the strain the refugees put on limited resources.