Dear Madam Speaker/Mr. Speaker

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Geneva, 27 March 2013

Dear Madam Speaker/Mr. Speaker,

It is our pleasure to invite your country’s parliament to participate in a regional parliamentary workshop on the subject The right to identity: promoting universal birth registration in Latin America and the Caribbean, which will be held in Lima at the Congreso de la República of Peru, from 7 to 8 June 2013.

The workshop will be organized jointly by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and UNICEF and hosted by the Congreso de la República. Its objective is to heighten awareness among parliamentarians of the need to do more to promote the registration of births. Birth registration, the administrative act officially recognizing a child, establishes the existence of the child for the purposes of the law and is the basis for the protection of many of its civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. Birth registration is essential for guaranteeing the child’s right to health, education and the wherewithal for its physical, mental and intellectual development. The systematic registration of births is hampered by such factors as the complexity of administrative procedures, the precarious situation of migrant parents and difficult access to civil registry offices.

The parliaments of Latin America and the Caribbean can contribute in great measure to the formulation of policies to address the problem of low levels of birth registration, which tends to affect mainly those segments of society that are disadvantaged or marginalized, and to the monitoring of the implementation of those policies. The present letter is accompanied by a description of the purpose and provisional agenda of the workshop, along with other details on its objectives and organization.

We hope that your parliament will be able to participate in this workshop, which will consider parliamentary strategies based on best practices at the national level. We encourage the parliaments to send a delegation of no more than five members (parliamentarians and parliamentary staff) who are themselves directly involved in this work, and to ensure a balanced composition of the delegations as regards political affiliation and gender.

As usual, participants will be asked to make all their own arrangements for visas, accommodation and travel. To assist us with hotel bookings, we enclose a reservation form, which may be useful for the participants. We should be grateful if you could let us know before 30 April whether your parliament intends to participate in the workshop. All of the enclosed documents and forms are also available on-line from the website of the IPU:

We sincerely hope that your parliament will be able to participate, and look forward to hearing from you.