Artilce 7 and its sister Article 8, which mandates the state to protect a child's right to an identity, closely ties the right to have a name to the right to be registered and the right to a nationality.

This triad of rights is closely tied to legal practices in many countries concerning naming and registering its citizens. Its meant to bolster many of these practices as well as serve as a defense against some of them. Germany, for example, has comparatively strict provisions on naming of children as well as a comparatively high threshold to actually change a name. For the latter, the German state requires a pertinent justification such as significant change in identity like marriage or a sex change or concerns for personal security but you can't change your name willy-nilly. In such cases, the right to name can be used to bolster a claim for necessity to change a registered and given name.

In case of provisions mandating names, the right to a name can also be used either as a defense from discriminatory state practices – the Child's Right International Network mentions countries with discriminatory naming practices like a federal state in India or Morroco – or in cases where a state needs to bolster their refusal of certain names. New Zealand e.g. was reported to have rejected names like 4Real for children. In these cases, the right to name serves to establish a practice of giving children names that will not cause them problems. Germany too, for example, has strict requirements for naming practices in that a child's sex needs to be recognizable from its name and that certain names can not be given to children when it is expected that they will cause them problems in life, such as "Satan" or "Hitler" as first names.

Historically speaking, the motivation to enshrine this right in the convention does not come so much from cultures that refuse to give their children names but from examples where the state refused to register the names of children. Sharon Detrick in her legal commentary on the Convention mentions two historical practices: One is the refusal of the Nazi state to register children born in Concentration Camps (few there were) under names, instead only registering them in the prisoner's list as numbers. They are found in e.g. the prisoner registry of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp only as the numbers assigned to them by the camp administration (mostly under the "B" numbers since what few children were born there came from the Hungarian Jews deported there in 1944). They are seen as being not only deprived of their lives but also the means to properly commemorate them.

A more widespread practice that figured heavily into this provision was how many a state dealt with stateless persons in the inter-war period in Europe and beyond. Statelessness remains a big problem (hence also the UNHCR convention to end statelessness) but was a huge problem in the inter-war period and also after WWII with millions of people being deprived from the protection that usually comes from being a citizen of a country. Detrick mentions cases such as inter-war France and Vichy France registering children born stateless not with their given names by their parents but merely as numbers in the pertinent registries. This is seen as depriving people of their identity and any potential ability to exercise what rights they have vis a vis any authorities. This also contributed to the right to a name enshrined in this convention.

The aforementioned Child's Right International Network also mentions that often not giving children a name and not registering them is a huge contributing factor to child and human trafficking often tied to modern iterations of slavery but this is too far out of my field and expertise as well as would probably violate the 20-year rule.

I would also be interested to know if countries have been accused of neglecting Article 7 (keeping in mind the 20 year rule), and what the situation was that gave rise to the alleged violation.

For example, I assume parents taking a while to decide on a name, or the Jewish tradition of waiting for the circumcision, is not a problem. What has been considered a breach?

If parents don't name their child will the stats be responsible for giving a name to the child? If so do they just have a database and a name is assigned by random or is there just a list of names and they go in order?