Your guide to legislative frameworks for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics
A strong legal framework is essential for a well-functioning Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) system.
CRVSlaws.org provides easy access to countries’ CRVS laws with detailed analysis based on international practice and United Nations’ guidance and standards. Summary fact sheets of the analysis are available to download.
While analyzing countries' laws our legal team identified four thematic areas of focus that cut across the six key topics. We have pulled together the questions from across the topics that relate to these thematic areas to allow users to focus on them.
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Medicolegal Death Investigation
Medicolegal Death Investigation (MLDI) is the systematic, interdisciplinary process of determining the cause, manner, and circumstances of an unexplained, sudden, or unnatural death.
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Role of the Health Sector
Health providers play a critical role in the civil registration system, acting as informants or notifiers of the occurrence of births, stillbirths, and deaths that occur in health facilities or under the care of a medical professional.
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Women’s & Children’s Rights
Legal identity documentation enables women’s access to financial services, ownership of property, economic participation and protects them from exploitation including through forced or early marriages.
When everyone is counted, every one counts
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Our Purpose
CRVS Laws is a legal analysis tool that helps countries understand and evaluate the laws governing their Civil Registration and Vital Statistics systems across 150+ metrics and 200+ laws from countries worldwide. It serves as a resource for legal drafting, policy implementation, comparative research, and identifying gaps relative to UN standards. Ultimately, we support countries in building the case for legal reform.
Civil registration systems create permanent official records of vital events, such as births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, that establish legal identity and generate the vital statistics essential for public health planning, governance, and socioeconomic policy. Modern CRVS systems are largely digital, requiring secure data sharing across government agencies, and depend on a strong legal framework to define responsibilities, ensure universal and equitable access, standardize procedures, remove barriers to registration, enable digitalization, and protect individual privacy.
