BEIRUT — Randa Kabbani says that when she fell in love with her husband, it never occurred to her that she was signing up for a life of hardship for their future children.
Kabbani is Lebanese and owns a family-run textile business in Beirut. Her husband — who died seven years ago, leaving her to raise their young son — was born to a Lebanese mother and lived his whole life in Lebanon. But because his father was Syrian, he was not eligible for Lebanese citizenship.
That’s because Lebanon is one of a shrinking number of countries where citizenship cannot be passed down by the mother.
Kabbani’s 19-year-old son has lived his entire life in Lebanon, but like his father, legally he is Syrian. He is prohibited from opening a bank account in his own name and limited in the property he can inherit from his mother. When he graduates from the American University of Beirut, where he is studying information technology, his job prospects will be constrained because legally he is a foreigner.
Were he not an only child, he would also be subject to compulsive military service in Syria, a war-torn country where he has never lived.
Before she married her husband, Kabbani says, she didn’t realize that she lacked the right to pass on her citizenship to her future children.
“If I had known, I wouldn’t have gotten married,” she says. “But this is my life. I should be able to choose anyone I want to marry. If I want to love someone, I have to ask first, what’s your nationality? It’s horrible.”
As of 2017, 26 countries in the world had laws limiting women’s ability to pass their citizenship to spouses and children, according to the United Nations. Most of them are in the Middle East and North Africa. But today there is a move to reform the laws, including in Lebanon. In 2004, Egypt gave women the right to pass down their nationality, although according to some reports, the practice has been slower to change. In particular, children of Palestinian fathers and Egyptian mothers faced obstacles in getting citizenship, ostensibly because it would interfere with the theoretical “right of return” to Palestine.
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Other countries in the Middle East and North Africa have since followed suit in reforming their nationality laws, including Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq and Yemen. An international conference last fall sponsored by the U.N. underscored calls for regional reform of citizenship laws.
Attempts in Lebanon to reform the nationality law — which dates back to 1925 when the country was still under French rule — have so far failed.
In 2009, a Lebanese judge ruled in favor of giving citizenship to the children of a Lebanese woman whose Egyptian husband had died. But the ruling was subsequently overturned. Johnny Azzi, the judge who ruled in the woman’s favor, said at a recent conference in Beirut that the nationality law is outdated. “The law is not the Bible,” he said. “The law is like medicine. When the expiration date comes, you should change it.”
Earlier in March, Human Rights Watch cited reforming the nationality law as one of five steps that Lebanon’s government could adopt to improve women’s rights.
Now, with parliamentary elections set to take place in May for the first time in nine years, a genuine push for change may be taking shape. Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil says he will submit a bill that will give Lebanese women married to foreign citizens the right to pass on their citizenship to their children, with the exception of those whose husbands are from “neighboring countries,” meaning Syria and Palestine. Bassil says he will also seek preventing Lebanese men married to Syrian or Palestinian women from passing on their citizenship. The proposed exception drew an outcry from many who have been pushing for reforms in the nationality law.
Activists also are making a renewed attempt to push for change in Lebanon. Kabbani is a leader in one of those campaigns, called “Jinsiyati Karamati,” or “My Nationality, My Dignity,” which organized a protest on March 18.
That’s good news for people such as Mustafa Shaar, another leader in reforming Lebanon’s nationality laws and who has lived all of his 44 years in the country. His mother and wife are Lebanese, and he speaks with a Lebanese accent. Like Kabbani’s son, he is barred from citizenship because his father is Syrian. For many years he was stateless before finally traveling to Damascus — in the midst of the civil war — to apply for Syrian nationality. But he says he doesn’t want to live in Syria. If he wants to travel elsewhere, having Syrian nationality is a liability these days, he says, because many countries are trying to stem the flow of refugees.
“I can’t go to Syria, and I can’t go out of Lebanon,” Shaar says. “I am stuck.”
As in many political matters, sectarian tensions left over from Lebanon’s civil war are part of the reason for the resistance to reforming the citizenship law. Lebanon apportions political power according to a calculation based on sect, with the political leaders of each group jealously guarding their own share.
Because the largest proportion of Lebanese women married to foreigners are Sunni, nationalizing their children and husbands would have potential implications for the demographic balance. And many Lebanese are particularly wary of giving citizenship to the children of Palestinian and Syrian refugees.
A 2009 report commissioned by the United Nations Development Program found that of about 18,000 marriages between Lebanese women and non-Lebanese men between 1995 and 2008, about 51 percent involved Sunni women, and 33 percent Shia women, with the Druze sect and various Christian denominations representing smaller numbers.
Sima Ghaddar, a researcher with The Century Foundation and who published a report on efforts to reform the nationality law, chalked up the resistance to change to fears of altering the demographic balance, compounded by chauvinism. Ghaddar says Lebanese men who marry Palestinian or Syrian women pass on their nationality to their wives as well as their children.
“If you don’t care about that count, why do you care about the women’s count?” she says.
The opposition to reform has also become more entrenched as a result of the Syrian crisis, Ghaddar says. The war in Syria, which has brought more than 1 million refugees to Lebanon, makes the question of nationality more urgent for people like Shaar, who are now unable to return to their ostensible homeland. But it has also fueled the demographic fears among Shia and Christian groups.
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The demographic concerns have also made for some strange political bedfellows in the campaign for reform, allying secular feminist s with conservative Islamist groups who are interested in seeing citizenship extended to more Sunnis.
For instance, Imad Hout, one of the most outspoken members of parliament in favor of mothers’ nationality rights, is a member of the conservative Jama’a Islamiyya, and has previously angered women’s rights campaigners by saying that marital rape does not exist.
Some are now pinning their hope on the outcome of May’s election. Shaar says some prominent political figures, including Prime Minister Saad Hariri, had assured him of their support for the campaign — after the election. And some of the new, reformist political parties that have sprung up ahead of this parliamentary election have made reforming the nationality law part of their campaigns.
“I don’t believe any politicians in Lebanon,” Shaar says. “But I have hope, because I don’t have another way.”
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Momentum Builds Across Middle East to Reform Nationality Laws originally appeared on usnews.com
