MOBILE – Mobility Law Open Lab with Christoph Sperfeldt

Universal Legal Identity and the Sustainable Development Goals: Leaving No One Behind?

Guest presenter: Christoph Sperfeldt is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University. He is also Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness and Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law at the Royal University of Law and Economics in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Prior to joining academia, he worked for more than a decade on human rights and transitional justice in Southeast Asia. Christoph will be visitor at MOBILE from 7 August to 3 September 2023.

Presentation: Establishing one’s legal identity has become fundamental to modern life. Yet, the World Bank estimates that around one billion people do not have any official government-issued proof of their legal identity. This is reflected in target 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aims to ‘provide legal identity for all’ by 2030. A proliferation of registration and identification initiatives has accompanied the implementation of this goal. Yet, in a context of weak institutions and complex political economies, formalised identification can lead to new forms of exclusion for some unregistered, stateless, mobile or marginalised populations – threatening the SDG’s ‘leave no one behind’ agenda. It is no coincidence that more than 75 per cent of the world’s known stateless belong to minorities. This seminar talk draws out some of the deeper complexities in order to understand the risks associated with the way policies and programs implemented in furtherance of SDG 16.9 are enacted.

Time: 17 August 2023 13:00-14:30

Place: MOBILE – 6B-2-22 Southern Campus

Online participation

For online participation please register using this form. You will receive a Zoom link after you have registered.