BEIRUT: Rights activists gathered on Wednesday to remind the incoming Lebanese government of its obligation to formulate a nationality law that does not discriminate against women. At a conference called by The National Committee to Eliminate all Forms of Discrimination against Women, activists launched what they said would be the third and most sustained campaign to demand an amendment to the inequitable law.
Under the current legislation, written in 1925, only Lebanese men married to non-Lebanese are entitled to pass on their nationality to their wives and children. Viewed as foreigners by the authorities, the families of Lebanese women married to non-Lebanese must pay regular residency permit fees and often face difficulties finding work, affordable education and health care.
An amendment in 1994 allowed the children of a Lebanese mother and foreign father to gain citizenship, albeit on the strict condition that the children marry a Lebanese and live in the country continuously for at least five years.
With over 18,000 Lebanese women married to non-Lebanese living in Lebanon, the need for a complete revision of the law is absolutely necessary, the committee’s Vice President Azza Mroue said. Including children and spouses, the number of people affected by the current legislation stands at more than 80,000, according to the United Nations Development Program.
Efforts to reform the law have been impeded by political jockeying, said Dr Mary al-Dibs, a member of the Committee. “As with every call to amend the law, the Lebanese are divided either politically or religiously,” she said at Beirut’s Press Syndicate.
A major point of contention is whether any future amendment will grant the right of citizenship to Lebanese women married to Palestinians. Those who oppose reforming the law say an amendment would alter Lebanon’s delicate confessional balance in favor of Sunni Muslims, the religion of most of the country’s 400,000 Palestinian refugees. But considering less than four percent of the 18,000 women are married to Palestinians, Dibs called the argument baseless. “Discriminatory positions, however disguised, contradict with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that we proudly say we were the first to sign,” she said.
Dibs said the Committee, together with other activists, would keep up its demand for an amendment to Article 1 of the nationality law until the text considered anyone born to a Lebanese father or mother a Lebanese citizen.
The pledge came as activists grouped in the “My nationality is a right for me and my family” campaign issued a statement on Monday expressing regret that Lebanon’s judiciary had appealed a decision to grant the children of a Lebanese mother citizenship.
The campaign was “disappointed that the office of the general prosecutor withdrew its first decision to “let the judge evaluate the case” and sought appeal after a month,” read the statement. In a rare verdict, a court in Jdeideh Al-Metn granted citizenship rights to the three minor children of a Lebanese mother and deceased foreign father. The office of the general prosecutor in Mount Lebanon has since appealed the ruling in a decision the campaign has said is driven by “political motives.”
“Day after day it becomes clearer that certain conservative political parties are ready to obstruct any improvement in the field of human rights in general and women’s rights in particular in order to serve specific political interests,” the campaign statement said.
The campaign urged the upcoming Ministerial Statement to explicitly mention a commitment to gender equality and the right of Lebanese women to full citizenship, especially the right to pass their nationality onto their children.