Arrêté granting any person without a birth certificate five years to regularise their civil status, Le Moniteur No. 10 of 16 January 2014

Le Moniteur No. 10, Thursday 16 January 2014, carrying an arrêté of President Michel Joseph Martelly on late birth registration.

Article 1 grants any person without a birth certificate five years from publication to regularise their civil status, with the benefits of the decree of 16 May 1995 and the assistance of Parquet officers in the cases set out at Article 4. Article 2 allows the late declaration to be made by a surviving biological parent without a prior judgment, and by a third party authorised by law where the parents are dead or unknown.

The preamble records why the measure is the third of its kind. The decree of 16 May 1995 opened a first five-year window and the arrêté of 1 February 2002 a second, and the government found that some citizens, in particular Haitians living or born abroad, had been unable to appear before any competent authority within them.

Civil registration is the gate to a national identity document, to school enrolment, to land title and to a bank account, so a lapsed registration window is an economic exclusion as much as a legal one. The instrument also sits behind the identification programmes the corpus tracks elsewhere.