The Holocaust
The Holocaust known as the Shoah, was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, aided by local collaborators, systematically murdered some six million European Jews—around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe—between 1941 and 1945. Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs, the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissenters such as communists and Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men. Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises to over 17 million. Germany implemented the persecution of the Jews in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March, which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society, which included a boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.
On 9–10 November 1938, during Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked, smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria, which Germany had annexed in March that year. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. Thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe; the deportation of Jews to the ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", discussed by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, across all territories controlled by the Axis powers. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with Wehrmacht police battalions and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings between 1941 and 1945.
By mid-1942, victims were being deported from the ghettos in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were killed in gas chambers. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945; the term holocaust, first used in 1895 to describe the massacre of Armenians, comes from the Greek: ὁλόκαυστος, translit. Holókaustos; the Century Dictionary defined it in 1904 as "a sacrifice or offering consumed by fire, in use among the Jews and some pagan nations". The biblical term shoah, meaning "destruction", became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews, first used in a pamphlet in 1940, Sho'at Yehudei Polin, published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland. On 3 October 1941 the cover of the magazine The American Hebrew used the phrase "before the Holocaust" to refer to the situation in France, in May 1943 The New York Times, discussing the Bermuda Conference, referred to the "hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust".
In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish". The term was popularized in the United States by the NBC mini-series Holocaust, about a fictional family of German Jews, in November 1978 the President's Commission on the Holocaust was established; as non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as Holocaust victims too, many Jews chose to use the terms Shoah or Churban instead. The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the enactment, between 1941 and 1945, of the German state policy to exterminate the European Jews. In Teaching the Holocaust, Michael Gray, a specialist in Holocaust education, offers three definitions: "the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945", which views the events of Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938 as an early phase of the Holocaust; the third definition fails, Gray writes, to acknowledge that only the Jewish people were singled out for annihilation.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as the "systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators", distinguishing between the Holocaust and the targeting of other groups during "the era of the Holocaust". According to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, most historians regard the start of the "Holocaust era" as January 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Other victims of the Holocaust era include. Hitler came to see the Jews as "uniquely dangerous to Germany", according to Peter Hayes, "and therefore uniquely destined t
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and called Porto Rico, is an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeast Caribbean Sea 1,000 miles southeast of Miami, Florida. An archipelago among the Greater Antilles, Puerto Rico includes the eponymous main island and several smaller islands, such as Mona and Vieques; the capital and most populous city is San Juan. The territory's total population is 3.4 million. Spanish and English are the official languages. Populated by the indigenous Taíno people, Puerto Rico was colonized by Spain following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1493, it was contested by French and British, but remained a Spanish possession for the next four centuries. The island's cultural and demographic landscapes were shaped by the displacement and assimilation of the native population, the forced migration of African slaves, settlement from the Canary Islands and Andalusia. In the Spanish Empire, Puerto Rico played a secondary but strategic role compared to wealthier colonies like Peru and New Spain.
Spain's distant administrative control continued up to the end of the 19th century, producing a distinctive creole Hispanic culture and language that combined indigenous and European elements. In 1898, following the Spanish–American War, the United States acquired Puerto Rico under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Puerto Ricans have been citizens of the United States since 1917, enjoy freedom of movement between the island and the mainland; as it is not a state, Puerto Rico does not have a vote in the United States Congress, which governs the territory with full jurisdiction under the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 1950. However, Puerto Rico does have one non-voting member of the House called a Resident Commissioner; as residents of a U. S. territory, American citizens in Puerto Rico are disenfranchised at the national level and do not vote for president and vice president of the United States, nor pay federal income tax on Puerto Rican income. Like other territories and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico does not have U.
S. senators. Congress approved a local constitution in 1952, allowing U. S. citizens on the territory to elect a governor. Puerto Rico's future political status has been a matter of significant debate. In early 2017, the Puerto Rican government-debt crisis posed serious problems for the government; the outstanding bond debt had climbed to $70 billion at a time with 12.4% unemployment. The debt had been increasing during a decade long recession; this was the second major financial crisis to affect the island after the Great Depression when the U. S. government, in 1935, provided relief efforts through the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration. On May 3, 2017, Puerto Rico's financial oversight board in the U. S. District Court for Puerto Rico filed the debt restructuring petition, made under Title III of PROMESA. By early August 2017, the debt was $72 billion with a 45% poverty rate. In late September 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico; the island's electrical grid was destroyed, with repairs expected to take months to complete, provoking the largest power outage in American history.
Recovery efforts were somewhat slow in the first few months, over 200,000 residents had moved to the mainland State of Florida alone by late November 2017. Puerto Rico is Spanish for "rich port". Puerto Ricans call the island Borinquén – a derivation of Borikén, its indigenous Taíno name, which means "Land of the Valiant Lord"; the terms boricua and borincano derive from Borikén and Borinquen and are used to identify someone of Puerto Rican heritage. The island is popularly known in Spanish as la isla del encanto, meaning "the island of enchantment". Columbus named the island San Juan Bautista, in honor of Saint John the Baptist, while the capital city was named Ciudad de Puerto Rico. Traders and other maritime visitors came to refer to the entire island as Puerto Rico, while San Juan became the name used for the main trading/shipping port and the capital city; the island's name was changed to "Porto Rico" by the United States after the Treaty of Paris of 1898. The anglicized name was used by the U.
S. government and private enterprises. The name was changed back to Puerto Rico by a joint resolution in Congress introduced by Félix Córdova Dávila in 1931; the official name of the entity in Spanish is Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, while its official English name is Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The ancient history of the archipelago, now Puerto Rico is not well known. Unlike other indigenous cultures in the New World which left behind abundant archeological and physical evidence of their societies, scant artifacts and evidence remain of the Puerto Rico's indigenous population. Scarce archaeological findings and early Spanish accounts from the colonial era constitute all, known about them; the first comprehensive book on the history of Puerto Rico was written by Fray Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra in 1786, nearly three centuries after the first Spaniards landed on the island. The first known settlers were the Ortoiroid people, an Archaic Period culture of Amerindian hunters and fishermen who migrated from the South American mainland.
Some scholars suggest their settlement dates back about 4,000 years. An archeological dig in 1990 on the island of Vieques found the remains of a man, designated as the "Puerto Ferro Man", dated to around 2000 BC; the Ortoiroid were displaced
Signature
A signature is a handwritten depiction of someone's name, nickname, or a simple "X" or other mark that a person writes on documents as a proof of identity and intent. The writer of a signature is a signer. Similar to a handwritten signature, a signature work describes the work as identifying its creator. A signature may be confused with an autograph, chiefly an artistic signature; this can lead to confusion when people have both an autograph and signature and as such some people in the public eye keep their signatures private whilst publishing their autograph. The traditional function of a signature is to permanently affix to a document a person’s uniquely personal, undeniable self-identification as physical evidence of that person's personal witness and certification of the content of all, or a specified part, of the document. For example, the role of a signature in many consumer contracts is not to provide evidence of the identity of the contracting party, but to provide evidence of deliberation and informed consent.
In many countries, signatures may be witnessed and recorded in the presence of a notary public to carry additional legal force. On legal documents, an illiterate signatory can make a "mark", so long as the document is countersigned by a literate witness. In some countries, illiterate people place a thumbprint on legal documents in lieu of a written signature. In the United States, signatures encompass marks and actions of all sorts that are indicative of identity and intent; the legal rule is that unless a statute prescribes a particular method of making a signature it may be made in any number of ways. These include by a mechanical or rubber stamp facsimile. A signature may be made by the purported signatory. Many individuals have much more fanciful signatures than their normal cursive writing, including elaborate ascenders and exotic flourishes, much as one would find in calligraphic writing; as an example, the final "k" in John Hancock's famous signature on the US Declaration of Independence loops back to underline his name.
This kind of flourish is known as a paraph. Paraphe is a term meaning initial or signature in French; the paraph is used in graphology analyses. Several cultures whose languages use writing systems other than alphabets do not share the Western notion of signatures per se: the "signing" of one's name results in a written product no different from the result of "writing" one's name in the standard way. For these languages, to write or to sign involves the same written characters. See Calligraphy. Special signature machines, called autopens, are capable of automatically reproducing an individual's signature; these are used by people required to sign a lot of printed matter, such as celebrities, heads of state or CEOs. More Members of Congress in the United States have begun having their signature made into a TrueType font file; this allows staff members in the Congressman's office to reproduce it on correspondence and official documents. In the East Asian languages of Chinese and Korean, people traditionally use stamp-like objects known as name-seals with the name carved in tensho script in lieu of a handwritten signature.
Some government agencies require that professional persons or official reviewers sign originals and all copies of originals to authenticate that they viewed the content. In the United States this is prevalent with architectural and construction plans, its intent is to prevent mistakes or fraud but the practice is not known to be effective. In e-mail and newsgroup usage, another type of signature exists, independent of one's language. Users can set one or more lines of custom text known as a signature block to be automatically appended to their messages; this text includes a name, contact information, sometimes quotations and ASCII art. A shortened form of a signature block, only including one's name with some distinguishing prefix, can be used to indicate the end of a post or response; some web sites allow graphics to be used. Note, that this type of signature is not related to electronic signatures or digital signatures, which are more technical in nature and not directly understandable by humans.
On Wikipedia, an online wiki-based encyclopedia edited by volunteers, the contributors "sign" their comments on talk pages with their username. The signature on a painting or other work of art has always been an important item in the assessment of art. Fake signatures are sometimes added to enhance the value of a painting, or are added to a fake painting to support its authenticity. A notorious case was the signature of Johannes Vermeer on the fake "Supper at Emmaus" made by the art-forger Han van Meegeren. However, the fact that painters' signatures vary over time might complicate the issue; the signatures of some painters take on an artistic form that may be of less value in determining forgeries. The term "signature" is used to mean the characteristics that give an object, or a piece of information, its identity—for example, the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle. In rock music and heavy metal music, electric guitarists develop a unique tone and sound using particular settings on their guitar amp, effects units and modifications to their guitar pickups, called their "signature sound".
In wrestling such as WWE, wrestlers are
Driver's license
A driver's license is an official document plastic and the size of a credit card, permitting a specific individual to operate one or more types of motorized vehicles, such as a motorcycle, truck, or bus on a public road. In most international agreements the wording driving permit is used, for instance in the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic; the term driver's license is American English. In this article, the American terminology and spelling is used but in country specific sections, the local spelling variant is used; the laws relating to the licensing of drivers vary between jurisdictions. In some jurisdictions, a permit is issued after the recipient has passed a driving test, while in others, a person acquires their permit before beginning to drive. Different categories of permit exist for different types of motor vehicles large trucks and passenger vehicles; the difficulty of the driving test varies between jurisdictions, as do factors such as age and the required level of competence and practice.
Karl Benz, inventor of the modern automobile, received a written "Genehmigung" from the Grand Ducal authorities to operate his car on public roads in 1888 after residents complained about the noise and smell of his Motorwagen. Up until the start of the 20th century, European authorities issued similar permits to drive motor vehicles ad hoc, if at all. Mandatory licensing for drivers came into force on 1 January 1904 after the Motor Car Act 1903 received royal assent in the United Kingdom; every car owner had to register their vehicle with their local government authority and be able to prove registration of their vehicle on request. The minimum qualifying age was set at 17; the "driving licence" gave its holder'freedom of the road' with a maximum 20 mph speed limit. Compulsory testing was introduced with the passing of the Road Traffic Act. Prussia a state within the German Empire, introduced compulsory licensing on 29 September 1903. A test on mechanical aptitude had to be passed and the Dampfkesselüberwachungsverein was charged with conducting these tests.
In 1910, the German imperial government mandated the licensing of drivers on a national scale, establishing a system of tests and driver's education requirements, adopted in other countries. In 1909, the Convention with Respect to the International Circulation of Motor Vehicles recognized the need for qualifications and authorization for international driving. In 1929, the notion of an "International Driving Permit" was first mooted in an international convention. In 1949, the United Nations hosted another convention on road traffic that standardised rules on roads, rules, driver's permits and such, it specified that national "driving permits" should be pink and that an "International Driving Permit" for driving in a number of countries should have "grey" covers with white pages and that "The entire last page shall be drawn up in French". In 1968, the Convention on road traffic, ratified in 1977 and further updated in 2011, further modernised these agreements, its main regulations about drivers permits are in Annex 6 and Annex 7.
The active version of those is in force in each contracting party no than "29 March 2011". Article 41 of the convention describes key requirements: every driver of a motor vehicle must hold appropriate documentation. Other countries in Europe introduced driving tests during the twentieth century, the last of them being Belgium where, until as as 1977, it was possible to purchase and hold a permit without having to undergo a driving test; as automobile-related fatalities soared in North America, public outcry provoked legislators to begin studying the French and German statutes as models. On August 1, 1910, North America's first licensing law for motor vehicles went into effect in the U. S. state of New York, though it applied only to professional chauffeurs. In July 1913, the state of New Jersey became the first to require all drivers to pass a mandatory examination before receiving a license. Many countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, have
Common law
In law, common law is that body of law derived from judicial decisions of courts and similar tribunals. The defining characteristic of "common law" is. In cases where the parties disagree on what the law is, a common law court looks to past precedential decisions of relevant courts, synthesizes the principles of those past cases as applicable to the current facts. If a similar dispute has been resolved in the past, the court is bound to follow the reasoning used in the prior decision. If, the court finds that the current dispute is fundamentally distinct from all previous cases, legislative statutes are either silent or ambiguous on the question, judges have the authority and duty to resolve the issue; the court states an opinion that gives reasons for the decision, those reasons agglomerate with past decisions as precedent to bind future judges and litigants. Common law, as the body of law made by judges, stands in contrast to and on equal footing with statutes which are adopted through the legislative process, regulations which are promulgated by the executive branch.
Stare decisis, the principle that cases should be decided according to consistent principled rules so that similar facts will yield similar results, lies at the heart of all common law systems. The common law—so named because it was "common" to all the king's courts across England—originated in the practices of the courts of the English kings in the centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066; the British Empire spread the English legal system to its historical colonies, many of which retain the common law system today. These "common law systems" are legal systems that give great precedential weight to common law, to the style of reasoning inherited from the English legal system. Today, one-third of the world's population lives in common law jurisdictions or in systems mixed with civil law, including Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Botswana, Cameroon, Cyprus, Fiji, Grenada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Jamaica, Liberia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Namibia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Tobago, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zimbabwe.
Some of these countries have variants on common law systems. The term common law has many connotations; the first three set out here are the most-common usages within the legal community. Other connotations from past centuries are sometimes seen and are sometimes heard in everyday speech; the first definition of "common law" given in Black's Law Dictionary, 10th edition, 2014, is "The body of law derived from judicial decisions, rather than from statutes or constitutions. This usage is given as the first definition in modern legal dictionaries, is characterized as the “most common” usage among legal professionals, is the usage seen in decisions of courts. In this connotation, "common law" distinguishes the authority. For example, the law in most Anglo-American jurisdictions includes "statutory law" enacted by a legislature, "regulatory law" or “delegated legislation” promulgated by executive branch agencies pursuant to delegation of rule-making authority from the legislature, common law or "case law", i.e. decisions issued by courts.
This first connotation can be further differentiated into pure common law arising from the traditional and inherent authority of courts to define what the law is in the absence of an underlying statute or regulation. Examples include most criminal law and procedural law before the 20th century, today, most contract law and the law of torts. Interstitial common law court decisions that analyze and determine the fine boundaries and distinctions in law promulgated by other bodies; this body of common law, sometimes called "interstitial common law", includes judicial interpretation of the Constitution, of legislative statutes, of agency regulations, the application of law to specific facts. Publication of decisions, indexing, is essential to the development of common law, thus governments and private publishers publish law reports. While all decisions in common law jurisdictions are precedent, some become "leading cases" or "landmark decisions" that are cited often. Black's Law Dictionary 10th Ed. definition 2, differentiates "common law" jurisdictions and legal systems from "civil law" or "code" jurisdictions.
Common law systems place great weight on court decisions, which are considered "law" with the same force of law as statutes—for nearly a millennium, common law courts have had the authority to make law where no legislative statute exists, statutes mean what courts interpret them to mean. By contrast, in civil law jurisdictions, courts lack authority to act. Civil law judges tend to give less weight to judicial precedent, which means that a
Certified copy
A certified copy is a copy of a primary document that has on it an endorsement or certificate that it is a true copy of the primary document. It does not certify that the primary document is genuine, only that it is a true copy of the primary document. A certified copy is used in English-speaking common law countries as a convenient way of providing a copy of documents, it is inexpensive to obtain. A certified copy may be required for official government or court purposes and for commercial purposes, it avoids the owner of important documents giving up possession of those documents which might mean a risk of their loss or damage. It has some similarities to a notarized copy, a form used in some countries, in some States in the USA. A notarized copy is signed by a notary public; the certified copy is signed by a person nominated by the agency asking for it. The person is referred to as an authorised person; the person, authorised to sign the certificate will vary between countries. Sometimes a person is authorised by legislation to do so.
In some countries, for example the United Kingdom and South Africa, identity documents can be certified by authorised Post Office staff. A copy of a primary document, to be used internationally may have to be in the form of a notarized copy rather than a certified copy. A notarized copy may be more expensive to obtain. A copy of a document to be used internationally may have to comply with special rules - Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents. If the primary document has to be translated, an additional certificate is required. For example, a birth certificate in Russian is to be used in an English-speaking country; the document must be translated professionally and have the professional's certificate of accuracy attached to the translation together with a copy of the primary document. The primary document, the translation, the certificate of accuracy are photocopied in the form of a certified copy. In the case of a birth certificate in English to be used in Russia, it is possible that a notarized copy will be required.
In Australia, certified copies are the creation of administrative practice. There is no specific legislation at federal, State or Territory level. Certified copies have long been used to give a veneer of authenticity to a photocopy of a primary document. In practice, they are easy to obtain at no cost other than the photocopy, are used in a wide range of situations with identity documents. In practice, purely for convenience, a copy may be certified by a person, able to witness a statutory declaration under federal legislation about Statutory Declarations. Categories of people are listed in Schedule 2 of the Statutory Declarations Regulations 1993. Schedule 2 states that Chiropractors, Legal practitioners, Medical practitioners, Optometrists, Patent attorneys, Physiotherapists, Trade mark attorneys and Veterinary surgeons may certify copies. Part 2 of the Schedule lists various other professions and positions, the members or occupants of which may certify copies. A typical certificate endorsed on the photocopy typed or stamped except for the signature - CERTIFIED TRUE COPY OF THE ORIGINAL I certify that this is a true copy of the original document.
Signed: Dated: Authority to sign: Telephone number: Certified copies can be quite basic in Australia due to the lack of legislation. More detail is required by the person or agency requiring it. Sometimes the person or agency will contact the person certifying the copy to limit the possibility of a fraudulent copy. In some States and Territories, police stations and libraries have arrangements to enable documents to be certified or witnessed by a Justice of the Peace; this service is free. Photocopies can be certified free at a Police Station. Certified copies, for example of the "Omang" state identity card, are used, are required for job applications, etc. In India, under section 2 of The Right to Information Act, 2005, the Public Information Officer is mandatorily'required to provide the appellant "Certified copies of documents or records."' In such a case, the PIO is only certifying that copies of documents or records are true copies of those held on a'X' page of a'X' file of the Public Authority, irrespective of their original source.
In Sri Lanka, certified copy or true copy of an original document can be attested by an attorney, a notary public or a justice of the peace. Except for notaries public in some states, there are no officials in the US who are authorized to make certified copies of any kind of document presented to them. If one is in a state where notaries public are not authorized to make certified copies, one must deal with the entity that issued the original document to obtain a certified copy; some states in the United States permit notaries public to certify copies. The U. S. State Department in 2005 compiled a table summarizing the state regulations. In the table below, notes from the State Department table have been omitted for states that do not authorize notaries to certify copies. Notaries in many states keep; the table shows that in some states notaries may make certified copies of their journals but may not make any other kind of certified copies. In cases where a bank, governme
Birth certificate
A birth certificate is a vital record that documents the birth of a child. The term "birth certificate" can refer to either the original document certifying the circumstances of the birth or to a certified copy of or representation of the ensuing registration of that birth. Depending on the jurisdiction, a record of birth might or might not contain verification of the event by such as a midwife or doctor; the documentation of births is a practice held throughout human civilization in China, Greece and Persia. The original purpose of vital statistics was for tax purposes and for the determination of available military manpower. In England, births were registered with churches, who maintained registers of births; this practice continued into the 19th century. The compulsory registration of births with the United Kingdom government is a practice that originated at least as far back as 1853; the entire United States did not get a standardized system until 1902. Most countries have laws that regulate the registration of births.
In all countries, it is the responsibility of the mother's physician, hospital administrator, or the parent of the child to see that the birth is properly registered with the appropriate government agency. The actual record of birth is stored with a government agency; that agency will issue certified copies or representations of the original birth record upon request, which can be used to apply for government benefits, such as passports. The certification is signed and/or sealed by the registrar or other custodian of birth records, commissioned by the government; the right of every child to a name and nationality, the responsibility of national governments to achieve this are contained in Articles 7 and 8 in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: "The child shall be registered after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality..." and "States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality and family relations..."....it's a small paper but it establishes who you are and gives access to the rights and the privileges, the obligations, of citizenship.
Despite 191 countries ratifying the Convention, the births of millions of children worldwide go unregistered. By their nature, data concerning unregistered children are approximate. About 29% of countries don't have available or sufficient data to assess global progress towards the SDG goal of universal coverage. However, from the data, available, UNICEF estimates that more than a quarter of children under 5 worldwide are unregistered; the lowest levels of birth registration are found in sub-Saharan Africa. This phenomenon disproportionately indigenous populations. In many developed countries, it contributes to difficulties in accessing civic rights. Birth registration opens the door to rights to children and adults which many other human beings take for granted: to prove their age. There are many reasons why births go unregistered, including social and cultural beliefs and attitudes. Retrospective registration may be necessary where there is a backlog of children whose births have gone unregistered.
In Senegal, the government is facilitating retrospective registration through free local court hearings and the number of unregistered children has fallen as a result. In Sierra Leone, the government gave the National Office of Births and Deaths special permission to issue birth certificates to children over seven. In Bolivia, there was a successful three-year amnesty for the free registration of young people aged between 12 and 18. Statelessness, or the lack of effective nationality, impacts the daily lives of some 11-12 million people around the world; those who suffer most are stateless infants and youth. Although born and raised in their parents' country of habitual residence, they lack formal recognition of their existence. States and territories of Australia are responsible for the issuance of birth certificates, through agencies titled "Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages" or similar. Registering a birth is done by a hospital through a "Birth Registration Statement" or similar, signed by appropriately licensed and authorized health professionals, provided to the state or territory registry.
Home births are permitted, but a statement is required from a registered midwife, doctor or 2 other witnesses other than the parent. Unplanned births require in some states. Once registered, a separate application can be made for a birth certificate at a cost; the person named or the parent can apply for a certificate at any time. There is no restriction on re-applying for a certificate at a date, so it could be possible to hold multiple original copies; the Federal government requires that births be registered through a "Proof of Birth Declaration" signed as above by a doctor or
