Fifty million children around the world did not have their birth registered, making them easy prey for prostitution networks, according to experts attending a UNICEF conference in Japan.
The number represents a 25 per cent increase on the last figure published by the United Nations Children's Fund in 1998, according to Ms Ellen Mouravieff-Apostol, who attended the workshop session of the Second World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation of Children in Yokohama.
Some regions are worse affected than others: in sub-Saharan Africa 71 per cent of children are not registered, while in South Asia, the figure is 63 per cent, dropping to 10 per cent in Central and Eastern Europe and still two per cent in the most industrialised nations.
The situation appears to be getting worse despite the recent efforts of a number of countries such as Thailand (where in contrast to past practice, virtually 100 per cent of births are registered), and the Philippines (where the comparable figure is 80 per cent).
According to UNICEF's coordinator in Uganda, Kori Egge, 90 per cent of the population of the East African country are unregistered, despite the fact that registration at birth was recognised as a universal right under the 1989 convention on the rights of the child.
More than 10,000 teenagers have been abducted by North Ugandan rebels to become child soldiers or to provide sexual services, children who are impossible to trace because they have no official identity.
Similarly, more than one million children orphaned by AIDS in Uganda are unable to inherit their parents' home or possessions because they have no papers to prove their identity, making them easy targets for traffickers to be exploited as labourers or sexually, Egge said.
The main obstacles to wider registration of children at birth is the lack of awareness by parents of the risks they are running by not doing so, and the often inflated charges for registration itself and the cost of travelling to do it, according to Plan International, an NGO working to reverse the situation.
Its field workers in developing countries run education programmes for families, usually from rural areas, as well as lobbying to persuade governments of the benefits of establishing a network of free registration offices which could also be used to conduct a census.
AFP