New birth certificate issue: Much ado about nothing

Registrar General says removing race from the “national birth certificate” was never on the cards Wimal Weerawansa takes umbrage over reported move earlier in week The new digitalised format to remove many loopholes of previous format

The Registrar General’s Department spent much of this week clarifying that it had never planned to remove the race of a child from the new birth certificate that is to be launched shortly.

While there will be several changes— such as no longer requiring the marital status of the baby’s parents to be included—the certificate will mention the race of the mother and father as well as nationality. Any reports to the contrary (which had caused a controversy over the past few days) were “false”, said N C Vithanage, Registrar General.

The news earlier this week that race will be dropped from the certificate prompted National Freedom Front leader Wimal Weerawansa to complain to Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa who consequently instructed the Registrar General to do no such thing. Even Buddhist monks turned up at Mr Vithanage’s office on Thursday morning to protest the move.

But the Registrar General blamed media sensationalism and electioneering on the controversy. There had not been a plan to drop ethnicity from what will hereafter be called a “national birth certificate”. There will, however, be multiple other changes. For instance, details will hereafter be entered electronically rather than by hand in order to minimise human errors associated with handwriting.

Every child will receive an identity number or a “citizen number” at birth that can later be used as their national identity card number. The new document will be digitally prepared on an A4 sized paper as opposed to the traditional A3 paper to ensure convenience.

The previous birth certificate style was susceptible to various types of fraud including age changes for early marriage and changes in location of residence to gain unfair advantage in s chool admissions, Mr Vithanage noted. These loopholes will be removed.

A QR code, a watermark that was only UV visible and a hologram sticker are some of the new authentication mechanisms. It was crucial to have a legal document in line with international standards, Mr Vithanage stressed. The new version will hold the Registrar General’s signature instead of District Registrar. This means all Sri Lankan birth certificates will have a common signature instead of 332 different ones.

The document will also be bilingual, Sinhala or Tamil and English. This saves holders the trouble of having it translated for visa application and other requirements.

But one of the most significant changes is the removal of the parents’ marital status from the birth certificate. “Children go through unnecessary discomfiture at the mention on an important official document of such information which has stigma associated with it,” Mr Vithanage said.

This change was brought to fruition by the Sectoral Oversight Committee on Women and Children under the last administration, he said. The marital status of the parents will still be maintained in the Department’s records for future use.

The digitization of the process also involves the SLT cloud where all citizen information will be stored. Technical safety precautions and backups have been introduced, the Director General said.

Discussions to change the birth certificate format began in 2005 with a Cabinet memorandum being approved in 2006. It has been a work in progress since. The final draft, prepared in 2019, was gazetted and approved by the Attorney General. The department is fine tuning minor legalities before implementation.

The intention is to introduce the new format for babies born from January 2019 onwards. While holders of the old version will not be required to get it changed, they may do so if they wish. Those details, however, will be dealt with in future.