Children on the Move and the Right to a Legal Identity (ChiMRI)

The right to an identity is enshrined in international law, yet globally over one billion people lack legal identity documentation. An estimated 237 million children do not have a birth certificate and an estimated 15 million people are stateless. Without legal identity, individuals are prevented from accessing fundamental human rights, participating in society and reaching their full potential. They are also at greater risk of being discriminated, exploited and of becoming stateless. Global attention to legal identity is growing, as evidenced in the UN Legal Identity Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goal 16 which aims to provide a “legal identity for all” by 2030. Identity rights research focuses predominantly on the right to know one’s origins in the context of assisted reproduction, surrogacy and adoption, and on birth registration to prevent statelessness. Less attention has been paid to legal identity rights of children on the move, the focus of this project. The umbrella term ‘children on the move’ refers to children and young people directly or indirectly affected by migration or displacement. It includes refugee, asylum seeking, migrant and trafficked children, children born to migrant and refugee parents, internally displaced and stateless children. In South Africa, gaps in the law and administrative hurdles regularly violate the legal identity rights of children on the move, especially of those living in care institutions. While legal scholarship has repeatedly highlighted these challenges, this project foregrounds the voices of 16-25 year-olds on the move who do not have a legal identity and who live or have lived in South African child care institutions. Building on the project team’s experience in creative and ethical knowledge production, this research combines legal empowerment with arts-based storytelling to develop and pilot ‘digital legal stories’ as an innovative conceptual framework, methodological approach, and advocacy tool. Legal empowerment is a form of rights-based development that empowers marginalized people by equipping them with knowledge to use the law to advance their rights. Collaborating with a leading South African refugee and child rights organisation, an arts-based facilitator and a multimedia artist, this project 1) offers legal empowerment training, 2) creates short audio-visual clips (‘digital legal stories’) in arts-based storytelling workshops about living without legal identity and 3) advocates for creating legal identity pathways for children on the move by engaging policy makers and the public through sharing the ‘legal stories’ at a national conference on Children on the Move, a highlevel Policy Roundtable and a mobile multimedia exhibition. The project’s goal is to a) advance understanding of how living without legal identity affects the life trajectories of young people on the move, b) increase participants’ knowledge and confidence regarding their rights and c) generate empirical evidence about how ‘legal stories’ can promote policy change. Guided by a high profile international Advisory Board, the project team’s methodological, subject and legal expertise, strong institutional support and partnerships, and a solid advocacy strategy, this project expands the creative use of legal empowerment, adds novel in-depth insights about how young people on the move without legal identity transition out of care in Africa, it equips participants with knowledge, skills and confidence, and creatively advocates for legal identity rights in South Africa and beyond. Additionally, ‘digital legal stories’ promise to be a replicable tool that can inform the global fight towards a legal identity for all.