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or social services fraud. Thus, although greaterinternational attention and the use of ‘namingand shaming’ approaches may be useful, the internationalcommunity must take care to developits evaluations and prescriptions through a dialoguewith relevant stakeholders.Another possible approach to combating politicallymotivated legal exclusions is to bring legalclaims before international human rights tribunals.The track record of this strategy is mixed,however: while international human rightslitigation has sometimes succeeded in raisingawareness, the tribunal decisions themselveshave typically not been enforced effectively.While international human rights litigation mayhave a place in the broader campaign to addressthe legal identity crisis, it would be a mistaketo presume that politically-motivated exclusioncan be cured by litigation. Political problemsdemand a political solution, and human rightslitigation is useful only if it is part of a broaderpolitical strategy.More generally, the crisis of politically-motivatedlegal exclusion highlights the need to increasethe relevance and effectiveness of the variousinternational covenants and declarations thatestablish the basic human rights to legal identityand nationality. Part of the problem mightbe attributable to a failure of national and internationalpolitical will to make the enforcementof these fundamental rights a priority. Anotherproblem might be that most of the existing humanrights conventions and protocols discussgeneral goals or end-states, but do not establishconcrete benchmarks or standards by which tojudge compliance efforts. It may therefore beworth considering if existing international humanrights instruments relating to legal identityshould be supplemented with clear internationalstandards establishing markers by which nationalactions on legal identity can be evaluated.An alternative or complement to publicinternational action might be greater efforts bythe donor, academic, and NGO communities toestablish institutes and foundations dedicated toraising the profile of the legal identity issue andmonitoring state compliance with the obligationto ensure that all people have proof of nationalityand are recognised as people in the eyes ofthe law.Providing Information and Creating Incentives toRegisterEven when opportunities to register one’s legalidentity are available, many of the poor may stillfail to take advantage of these opportunities. Onereason may be because poor people do not knowabout formal registration, or they do not understandthe benefits of a formal legal identity. Anotherreason may be that the poor are suspiciousof the state and its agents, and this warinessleads them to avoid formal registration even whenit would be in their interests. Yet a third possibilityis their rational calculation that the expectedcosts of formal registration outweigh the benefits.When ignorance or wariness of the state are themajor obstacles, one method of redress may be torely on culturally familiar and reliable intermediariesto convey information about registration andto assist with the registration process. Bundlingof registration services together with other governmentor NGO services or with traditional ritualsand practices would be consistent with this approach.More generally, many successful registrationefforts have relied on paralegals, NGOs andlaypeople to assist poor individuals and communitiesin completing the formal registrationprocedure.For example, the Egyptian Centre for Women’sRights and other Egyptian civil society organi-10