The United Nations has declared that one of its goals is to provide everybody on
earth with a legal identity by 2030.
Failing the normality test
The rule of law must assume that the population consists of subsistent unique
individuals, normal persons with a name and distinct from all others. This is the
foundation of how the law understands human identity. The superstructure of
human rights rests on this notion. But what is a normal person? The assumption
of normalcy itself generates new categories of human beings, those that fail the
normality test. Here are some examples.
Identical twins are not normal persons in the legal sense. After a spectacular
heist in a department store in Berlin, the police tracked down the perpetrator
based on DNA traces found at the scene of the crime, but he went free. The
reason: he had an identical twin. In court, the police could prove at least one of
the brothers broke into the department store, but were unable to determine which
one.
Dead people are not normal persons in the legal sense, or are they? Deceased
persons need to file income tax returns. Deceased persons may receive dividends
and pensions (which next of kin have occasionally been reported to collect, for
instance in super-high life expectancy Japan). And we haven’t even touched on
the delicate question of how dead a person has to be to count as dead. Of late—
meaning a few decades—‘loss of personhood’ has become the subject of intense
and difficult deliberations about the death of human beings. ‘Loss of
personhood’ is another word for brain death, a concept that has changed our
thinking about the border between life and death. Can it be equated with the
extinction of someone’s identity? Hardly, because a deceased person’s physical
identity persists and can be relevant, for instance to prove their innocence or
guilt post-mortem.
Demented people are not normal persons. When do forgetfulness, nominal
amnesia, and lack of self-awareness fade into irreversible attenuation of
personality? Does a change of personality imply a change of a person’s identity?
The capacity to bequeath one’s property by will presupposes soundness of mind.
Can we really measure that soundness? How many wills have been contested for
lack of testamentary capacity?