The International Commission on Civil Status, or ICCS (French: Commission internationale de l'état civil, or CIEC), is an intergovernmental organisation whose aim is to promote international cooperation in civil status matters and to improve the functioning of national civil status services.[1] It was provisionally founded in September 1948 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and officially recognised by an exchange of letters in December 1949 and two protocols in 1950 and 1952.[2] The organisation is seated in Strasbourg, France,[3] and its official language is French.
Founded after World War II in the context of millions of refugees, missing and displaced people, the organisation's aim was to facilitate the cooperation between states in establishing, recognising and validating civil status documents, also known as vital records, such as birth, marriage and death certificates. It did so by drafting international treaties such as the Convention on the issue of multilingual extracts from civil status records, which provides standard multilingual formats of vital records, allowing their international acceptance without the need for translation or legalisation. Later conventions drafted by the ICCS include the Convention on the recognition of decisions recording a sex reassignment.
The ICCS was created by five founding member states in 1948. In 1952, a protocol opened the organisation to accession by any state.[2] By 1999, 11 more states had acceded to the ICCS, reaching a peak of 16 member states. After 2007, only one more state acceded and 12 states left the organisation, resulting in only five member states by 2022.[4] In 2024, the Francophone Notary Association, representing 28 states,[a] joined the organisation as a non-state member.[1]
Several states are observers of the organisation:[1]