Lebanese women now allowed to issue civil registers for their underage chidren

The Director General of Personal Status at the ministry of interior, Brigadier General Elias Khoury, issued a circular on September 19 giving Lebanese women the right to obtain individual registers for her underage children. The civil registrars, the circular said, are asked to accept applications submitted by Lebanese women, irrespective of their marital status (whether married, divorced or widowed) that are included in the records, each within their legal power. The circular stressed that the above measure does not exempt the Lebanese woman from presenting the remaining documents required by the concerned public departments to complete any other procedure. To note, the personal status circular followed a previous memorandum allowing divorced Lebanese women to include their children in their civil register (https://goo.gl/bmVosi). On the new memo, Lina Abu Habib, Executive Director of Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development and Peace (WLP), said in an interview with L’Orient Le Jour, that the step was small and reforms slow, nevertheless, it is considered a positive achievement that does not offer much to gender equality campaigners. Abu Habib wondered if such a measure was only an embellishment, demanding the amendment of personal status laws and liberating them from religious authority and sectarianism. And while Abu Habib did not play down the above measure, she asked about the fate of more important issues like for example, inheritance or travel permissions for children, noting that the two measures confirm that the family connection involves both parents, and hence the importance of allowing women to confer nationality to their children. (An Nahar, L’Orient Le Jour, September 24, 25, 2018)

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Divorced Lebanese women allowed to included children in their personal registry