CNN
Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Report: One-fifth of Brazilian babies unrecorded

Birth certificate required for access to many services

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- More than one-fifth of the Brazilians born last year have no birth certificates and do not "officially" exist, the government's statistics institute said Tuesday.

According to a study released by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, 21.6 percent of all Brazilians born in 2003 have not been officially registered.

The figure was little better than the 23.4 percent of newborns believed to have gone unregistered in 1993, the last time a similar survey was undertaken.

Brazilians without birth certificates are denied access to schools and many government assistance programs.

A law passed in 1997 requires registry offices to issue free birth certificates to poor people, but the institute said residents of Brazil's poorer and more remote regions apparently were unaware of the service. Before the law was passed, many poor Brazilians didn't register their children because they couldn't afford the small processing fee.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.