Panama

Intergenerational statelessness among the migrant-descended / minority groups

In Panama, many people from Ngäbe‑Büglé communities, mobile Indigenous peoples who often migrate cross-border between Costa Rica and Panama as seasonal agricultural workers, lack birth certificates. The CRC (2011, 2018) and Human Rights Council (2011, 2015) have issued recommendations to ensure birth registration of Indigenous children.

Promising Practices

Beginning in 2014, Panama has worked with Costa Rica and the UNHCR on the ‘Chiritocos Project,’ a collaborative effort to register the births of Indigenous people. Both countries have coordinated binational mobile units to bring civil registration services closer to this population, resolve late registration cases and provide identification and nationality documents. Outreach workers identified more than 3,600 individuals at risk of statelessness because they were not registered in either country.