Invisible Children: Legal services for children and their families

The Children's Institute's legal services project is focused on addressing exclusions from birth registration and social grants as well as education and health.

While the Child Support Grant (CSG) is widely acclaimed for its broad reach, exclusion errors remain a serious problem – millions of children are unable to access the CSG. Exclusions are highest among infants with a key barrier being the unavailability of enabling documentation: birth certificates for children and/or identity documents (IDs) for parents and caregivers.

Once we have secured grants for children without birth certificates, through our legal services project we assist parents and caregivers to apply for birth registration and IDs. While assisting families to apply for birth certificates, we identify common system barriers with the Department of Home Affairs and other government offices that block access for our clients and thousands more children in similar circumstances.

Since 2018, we have supported over 500 parents and caregivers across the country to apply for their IDs and birth certificates for their children, and to access social grants while awaiting their documents from Home Affairs. 

The categories of children who tend to be excluded from birth registration include:

  • Children born to young mothers who cannot obtain their own IDs because they were orphaned or abandoned when they were children
  • Children being cared for by unmarried fathers
  • Children who have a parent who is not South African
  • Children who have moved across provinces
  • Children whose parents’ IDs have been blocked

Through this work we can identify a range of systemic and procedural obstacles and compile detailed evidence for public interest litigation. 

Litigation

Late registration of birth court case

The Children’s Institute and a group of parents, represented by the Legal Resources Centre, launched litigation in the Western Cape High Court against the Department of Home Affairs in December 2024. This legal action is due to the ongoing failure of Home Affairs to make decisions on applications for birth certificates, and the consequences for the constitutional rights of children. We seek to compel Home Affairs to attend to the applications of specific parents and children involved in our court case, as well as the systemic problems resulting in over a quarter of a million children waiting for years for decisions on their late registration of birth applications.

Home Affairs failed to file its Answering Affidavit by the due date of 16 May. In June we applied for an order to compel Home Affairs to file its Answering Affidavit, to move the case forward and prevent further delays in the realisation of the rights of a quarter of a million children. We are waiting for a Judge to consider the application. By September 2025 Home Affairs had still not filed its Answering Affidavit.

Blocked IDs court case

Lawyers for Human Rights launched a court case in 2023 to have the Department of Home Affairs’ practice of blocking IDs declared unconstitutional. We joined the case as an amicus (friend of the court), represented by the Centre for Child Law. The case was not focused on children specifically, so the purpose of our intervention was to demonstrate how blocking an adult’s ID deprives their children of birth registration. Our evidence was based on the experiences of clients in our legal services project.

In January 2024 the court ordered Home Affairs to:

  • unblock the IDs of children immediately and report to the court within 12 weeks that it has done so;
  • stop preventing birth registration of children while their parents’ IDs are being investigated by Home Affairs; and
  • refrain from blocking a child’s ID unless having obtained a court order allowing it to do so.