About CRVS Laws
Purpose of the CRVS Laws Database
The CRVS Laws Database provides detailed legal analysis of countries’ CRVS legal framework and offers downloadable summaries that address key issues in the law.
The database’s main purpose is to assist countries in understanding the legal framework governing their CRVS systems and examine the scope for reforming existing laws. The features of this database and their potential applications allow users to:
- UN Guidelines and International Standards and Practice: Easily navigate leading international guidelines for specific issues of CRVS practice and law across six key CRVS topics including birth and death registration, stillbirth reporting, medical certification of cause of death and civil registration and vital statistics systems.
- Country-Specific Legal Analysis: Quickly navigate in-depth legal analysis of a country’s CRVS legal framework across 100+ metrics that assess the laws’ strength against the internationally recommended standards, guidelines and practice.
- Legal Drafting: Access 200+ CRVS laws in English and other official languages of countries featured on the database, offering examples of how to draft whole laws or specific provisions.
- Quick Summaries: Download summaries of the analysis for an overview of a country’s CRVS system with selected questions assessing strength of legal frameworks.
- Evaluation tool: Map the legal landscape of analyzed countries, understand what laws and rules make up the CRVS legal framework, where gaps in law exist as compared to UN standards and guidance, and how to address those gaps.
- Implementation tool: Determine why policy interventions on the ground are not being implemented if the law allows or mandates the policy. Conversely, assessing if the law could prevent implementation of a proposed policy intervention and thereby requires reform.
- Research tool: Conduct comparative research to understand regional or inter-regional practices.
The metrics in the CRVS Laws database have served as a very useful checklist for examining the adequacy of a country’s laws. It has been particularly helpful that the metrics reference key international standards, as this has informed advocacy for specific approaches. These references have proved particularly useful when government officials request justification for a specific recommendation at short notice.
What do CRVS systems do?
Civil registration systems create an official, permanent record of vital events, such as birth, death, marriage, and divorce. Records of these vital events establish legal identity and when operating effectively, serve as the principal source of data for generating comprehensive vital statistics.
Well-functioning civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems are recognized as a cornerstone of a country’s health information and planning. They produce population data including mortality data, life expectancies, fertility and burden of disease; critical to designing, monitoring and implementing public health interventions. The data is also essential for data for good governance, enabling targeted policy interventions across a range of socio-economic human rights, such as education, public housing, infrastructure, economic and development planning.
More information on the benefits of strong CRVS systems is available here.
Modern CRVS systems are largely digital and to be efficient and effective, they require data sharing across multiple IT systems and databases, including health, local government, courts and justice, statistics office, and a population register. These systems need to be compliant with data sharing and data privacy laws and principles.
The Role of Law in Strengthening CRVS Systems
A robust legal framework is the foundation or bedrock on which universal, continuous, compulsory, permanent and confidential CRVS systems are built. The law establishes the structure of a CRVS agency and creates legal obligations, standards and procedures to register births and deaths, record stillbirths and document medically certified causes of death.
The legal framework should:
- Establish the specific roles and responsibilities of multiple agencies, ministries, officials and stakeholders.
- Ensure universal and equitable access to civil registration for all events, including for marginalized or underserved communities.
- Provide uniformity, standardization and consistency of procedures essential to the production of accurate civil records and vital statistics.
- Eliminate barriers to access civil registration and increase incentives to register vital events.
- Facilitate digitalization of CRVS systems, providing for use of technology.
- Protect privacy of individuals while enabling that data-sharing across governmental agencies.