Focus

Focus on Modernizing the civil register

Challenges

The civil register is used to manage the situation of all the citizens of a nation, providing the means to create certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, death, etc. As such, it plays an important role in the security of a country’s institutions, in particular identifying the holders of nationality as it is the source from which identification documents are issued.

These documents enable individual citizens to exercise their rights and responsibilities via digital means. Clearly, document theft and fraud are sources of social injustice as the community may inadvertently allocate resources to an ill-intentioned individual feigning another person's identity, thus depriving the genuine citizen of that to which he or she is legally entitled.
The first element of reliability that one should be able to expect, to avoid creating a climate of mistrust across the e-Government program, is the theft-proof nature of the procedure involved in issuing and distributing documents.

Where do the weaknesses in the system lie? They are found at two stages of the document production process:

Presentation of forged supporting documents when registering the application.
Reception and validation of the application by the registrar, either when the application is registered or during the examination of the application before the document is physical produced

Next: Towards a biometric Civil Register >>