Gender-Discriminatory Nationality Law Multiplies Statelessness in Lebanon
Claudia Bennett BUSL’20
As my colleague Kristina Fried introduced in a recent post, IHRC’s project on statelessness this year is focused on the laws and policies governing stateless persons and persons at risk of statelessness in Lebanon. Through our interviews and the civil society workshop we co-organized in Beirut, it became apparent that a major cause of statelessness in Lebanon is gender discrimination in nationality law. According to the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, gender discrimination is one of the greatest perpetuators of statelessness. This is especially true in the context of protracted refugee situations, where an entire generation of children is at risk of statelessness purely because they cannot receive their mother’s nationality.
Gender discrimination in nationality laws is not unique to Lebanon. In fact, there are twenty-five countries worldwide who deny mothers the right to pass on their nationality to their children or spouses. The Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, founded in 2015, aims to achieve law reform through mobilising international action. In the Middle East and North Africa (“MENA”) region twelve states do not allow mothers to confer their nationality to their children: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the UAE. Meanwhile, in other countries in the MENA region recent positive developments in nationality legislation provide blueprints for how change can happen. Morocco reformed its nationality law to allow mothers to transfer nationality in 2004, Algeria in 2005, Egypt in 2007, Tunisia in 2010 and Yemen in 2010. In October 2017, the League of Arab States (“LAS”) gathered for a conference on Good Practices and Regional Opportunities to Strengthen Women’s Nationality Rights. Eighteen Arab countries were present and participants discussed the benefits of the strategies used in the nationality law reforms in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen. Algeria and Morocco achieved legal reform through simple legislation that granted women and men equal rights in conferring nationality; the reforms boiled down to the addition of one sentence in the existing nationality law. The 2017 LAS conference resulted in the adoption of an Outcome Statement that promotes gender equality in the “acquisition, change, retention or conferral of nationality.” This statement was quickly followed by a Ministerial Declaration on Belonging and Legal Identity adopted in March 2018 which combined the outcome statement and the main provisions of the 2016 Arab Declaration, which called for gender equality, the removal of reservations to Article 9 of Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (“CEDAW”)[1] as well as children’s right to nationality.
To this day, Lebanon’s commitments to CEDAW have not been translated into domestic law. Instead, the 1925 Decree №15 on Lebanese Nationality governs how parents can pass on Lebanese nationality to their children. The Decree is gender-discriminatory as it only allows a Lebanese father to transfer his nationality to a child. Thus, if a child is born to a Lebanese mother and a stateless father, for example, such child would be without documentation of nationality. The only way a Lebanese woman can pass on her nationality to her child is if she can prove to a court that the father is dead or missing. Another gender-discriminatory feature of the 1925 law is that women who marry foreign men cannot pass on their nationality to such spouse. Spousal naturalization is thus only an option if a foreign woman marries a Lebanese man.
Lebanese activists have termed the 1925 law “misogynistic” and pointed out that children born in Lebanon without citizenship are barred from education, healthcare and jobs in certain fields. Even when a child is entitled to Lebanese citizenship under law, Lebanon’s labyrinthine civil registration processes (detailed in Kristina Fried’s recent post) unfairly disadvantage poorer parents who may not be able to carry them out without losing wages or employment. This is because the father must be present at all five stages of the birth registration process. Each of the five stages of birth registration requires visiting a different office, most likely in a different town, and, always, a long waiting period. As fathers in Lebanon are far more likely than mothers to be the family’s wage earners (World Bank Data 2017), ensuring the father’s physical presence can be particularly burdensome. Adding to the problem is that birth registration must be carried out within a year from birth, or else through complicated court proceedings and the payment of late fees. It is thus no wonder that in many cases a child can become stateless, purely because a woman, even one married to a Lebanese citizen, cannot register her child without the father present.
It’s important to acknowledge that gender discrimination in the treatment of women in Lebanese law is exacerbated by and worsens the burden of three major systemic issues in Lebanese society.
The first is two-pronged: 1) ad-hoc policies and circulars govern civil registration in a temporary and ever-changing manner; and 2) the poor dissemination of these ad-hoc policies and their promulgation are inconsistent among geographic regions and populations in Lebanon. These intertwined concerns are well illustrated by the March 2018 decree allowing Syrians and Palestine refugees from Syria to register their children who were born between the 2nd of January 2011 and the 2nd of August 2018. A month earlier, in February 2018, another poorly disseminated decree was issued allowing Syrians to renew their registration with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (“UNHCR”) for free. Both decrees are short-term solutions which did not benefit all intended populations due to poor communication.
The second systemic issue is that Lebanon has no legal framework for stateless persons, or refugees, which in effect causes stateless persons born in Lebanon to grow up without access to basic human rights and pass away without any record confirming their existence. Without a comprehensive and accessible refugee registration process, civil registration is essentially impossible. The third problematic reality is the State’s delegation of personal status matters to religious courts. Lebanon has eighteen religious denominations, each with its own legal system that governs personal status. This structure is unlikely to change any time soon, as the equal empowerment of religious denominations is considered the mainstay of peaceful coexistence in Lebanon. However, this ultimately means that individuals are subject to disparate treatment across sects.
Although remedying all three of these systemic problems requires decades of coordinated work, almost all of the stakeholders we spoke to in Lebanon agreed that by simply removing gender discrimination in Lebanon’s nationality law, the state could dramatically diminish the prevalence and risk of statelessness in the country. Changing the law in Lebanon does not require major rewriting of existing provisions, but it does call for political will and the combined forces of civil society organisations.
The representatives of civil society we spoke with in Lebanon, while united, remained highly skeptical that political will could be summoned. Civil society actors and NGO’s have repeatedly pitched strategies to make headway in Lebanon to Lebanese policy makers, drawing on successes in the rest of the MENA region. Ever since the early 2000s, Frontiers Ruwad have been at the forefront of tackling registration and documentation issues in Lebanon and seeking legal and policy solutions. One of their recommendations early on was to abolish the gender-discriminatory law in Lebanon. The first major campaign in Lebanon was started by The Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action (“CRTD-A”) in 2013 titled “My Nationality is a Right for Me and My Family.” To this day, they continue advocating for one key provision in the nationality law to be changed to “a person is deemed Lebanese if he is born of a Lebanese father or a Lebanese mother.” Women’s Learning Partnership (“WLP”) is another organization which has been campaigning for almost two decades to change the law. Their current focus is on lobbying members of parliament to pass bills that would decrease the obstacles women face to transfer their nationality to their children. Turning to the legislature as a strategy makes sense given that recent efforts to expose the constitutionality of gender discrimination in nationality law through the courts have run into severe opposition. In the 2009 case of an Egyptian man who married a Lebanese woman, a Lebanese judge granted the couple’s children Lebanese citizenship, but the state appealed the decision and it was overturned in May 2010. The hostile reaction to the judge who issued the initial grant indicated to activists that the state was intent on clinging to gender discrimination in nationality law, or at least on ensuring it remains a non-justiciable matter.
Last year, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gebran Bassil, stated he would draft a new bill allowing women to pass on their citizenship but it would not apply to women who marry men of neighbouring states, hinting at Syria and Palestine. This exception in the draft bill is relevant, as it has been argued that at the core of the political stalemate on nationality law is concern with Lebanon’s demographic balance and unwillingness to integrate Palestinians living in Lebanon into the citizenry through spousal naturalization (Al-Barazi, 2017, at page 3). Perhaps lobbying the executive branch would be the way to go next, given that, as of February 2019, the government has a record number of female ministers.
Although there have been many unsuccessful attempts at overturning the gender-discriminatory law and proposals have been brought forward to reduce statelessness in Lebanon, this is no time to abandon the fight. Because gender discrimination magnifies the risk of statelessness in Lebanon, a strategy to eliminate gender discrimination in nationality law is likely the way forward in ensuring that statelessness is reduced and eliminated, as well.
[1] Article 9 states; 1. States Parties shall grant women equal rights with men to acquire, change or retain their nationality. They shall ensure in particular that neither marriage to an alien nor change of nationality by the husband during marriage shall automatically change the nationality of the wife, render her stateless or force upon her the nationality of the husband.2. States Parties shall grant women equal rights with men with respect to the nationality of their children.
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Author Bio: Claudia Bennett recently completed her second year in law school during which she participated in the BUSL Int’l HR Clinic and served as Deputy Gala Chair for the BUSL Public Interest Project. She was born in New Zealand and grew up in Singapore and has a bachelor’s degree in human rights and art history from Bard College. After graduation, she hopes to work in international human rights or international humanitarian law.
