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OAS to Support Panama in Strengthening the Right to Identity and Civil Registration in Hospitals

The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, and the President of the Electoral Tribunal of Panama, Judge Gerardo Felipe Solis Diaz, today signed a cooperation agreement for the "Project of Implementation of the biometric verification system in health facilities and the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Science" in the framework of the Inter-American Program for a Universal Civil Registry and the Right to Identity (PUICA) of the hemispheric body.

Through the agreement, the OAS will collaborate with Panamanian authorities in their efforts to provide the right to identity to newborn children to be registered automatically to ensure the right parentage of children, and to decrease fraudulent actions. The agreement will be implemented through various institutional strengthening, including the installation of biometric equipment, the development of databases, the training of medical personnel and the creation of awareness campaigns and dissemination.

At the signing ceremony of the Agreement, the OAS Secretary General explained that "this project is aimed at a subject that is still pending in many of our countries," though he specifically noted the progress made in the registration of minors. "Our figures indicate that since the PUICA program began, the rate of no registration of children has fallen from 18% to 10%. However, there are still many children who are not registered and many deaths that are not recorded,” he said.

The head of the hemispheric organization also recalled that "identity is a right that not all citizens of the Americas enjoy," reiterated the Organization’s commitment with issues of identity and predicted that the project agreed with Panama "will have the same success that other activities we have undertaken together have had."

The President of the Panamanian Electoral Tribunal thanked the OAS "for the support offered through this initiative," and explained the importance of the project by saying that “it will expand the service of identification with accuracy and certainty through the method of biometrics in hospitals to be certain of the exact identity of the mothers at the time to give birth. This initiative will allow for a fully recognition of the human right of all people to identity, giving certainty of it from birth."

The project, supported by the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation, aims to register about 15,670 births that occur each year in Panama, and is held in the framework of the countries’ commitments to promote and ensure the full recognition of the right to identity.

In 2008, the OAS General Assembly approved a Resolution encouraging its members to adopt measures to promote the right to identity and expand the inter-American cooperation in the field, the exchange of good practices, and the strengthening of responsible institutions and the universal birth registration in the continent by 2015.

The agreement’s signing ceremony, held at OAS headquarters in Washington DC, was also attended by the National Director of Civil Registry of Panama, Sharon Sinclair de Dumanoir; the Permanent Representative of Panama to the OAS, Ambassador Guillermo Cochez; the Chairman of the Permanent Council and Representative of Guatemala, Jorge Skinner-Klee; as well as other representatives of the Organization’s Member States.

A gallery of photos of the event is available here.

For more information, please visit the OAS Website at www.oas.org.

Reference: E-784/11