Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc
Wow, that's pretty scary. Is it for registering to vote, taxes, drivers licenses/ ID purposes?
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France and the UK do not ask people to be registered. In fact the UK doesn't even have ID cards (they had them only during WW2), whereas France has ID cards (although you don't need to change your ID card when you move to another address), but on the other hand their so-called "terror laws" are much more draconian and in breach of freedom than in France (thanks to 'Yo Blair').
Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Scandinavian countries all have population registers (other countries may have them too, but that's the ones I know). When you move into a municipality, you have to register yourself at the municipality in the population registers. If you don't, it makes life very difficult for you.
In France, when the authorities need to know your address for some administrative procedures (like when you register to take the driving test), they ask you to carry your utility bills to know your address. In the countries with population registers, they simply check in the population registers.
In any case the 2011 censuses were not based on the population registers. They were based on an individual count of the population just like the decennial censuses in the US. Many European countries like Germany had stopped carrying out censuses, because they thought the population registers were enough to know the number of people living in a given place, but the EU mandated them to carry out a EU-wide 2011 census, and the census results showed that the population registers were quite flawed (in our mobile society, people don't necessarily tell the authorities when they move out of a place, so they are not crossed out from the registers, and can be counted in two different places). That's why after the census Germany, Italy, and Spain had to correct all the population registers.
Now all EU countries will carry out another census in 2021 (except France which carries out an annual census... the results of the 2012 French census will be released next week in fact!).