Women’s right to grant citizenship to their family members is indivisible and unconditional

In collaboration with My Nationality is A Right For Me And My Family Campaign, the Lebanese Women Democratic Gathering (RDFL) organized yesterday a joint seminar in which they presented a summary prepared by HEYA Center for Public Policy about depriving women of the right to grant citizenship to their family members. Outlining the discriminatory system in Lebanon, the paper concluded that women have not been able to reach any progress in this direction, notwithstanding Lebanon’s commitment as a signatory to the many international agreements calling for ending all forms of discrimination and achieving equality in political and civil rights. According to HEYA, only 5 Arab states (namely, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and lately, Iraq) grant citizenship to children of their women nationals married to foreigners. Lebanon lags behind, it noted. The debate centered around refuting the assumption of naturalization brought up by opposers of women’s rights to nationality (on the pretext that granting nationality to children of a Lebanese mother married to a Palestinian could lead to naturalization). In this respect, My Nationality campaign activist, Karima Chbarro, revealed initial figures disclosed to her which show that the ratio of Lebanese women wed to Palestinians is the lowest compared to Lebanese women wed to foreigners from other nationalities. This, Chabarro maintained, springs from a narrow-minded agenda based on confessional and demographic considerations. While most of the interventions in the symposium came in response to the foreign minister Gebran Bassil’s racist statements recently, former minister Tark Metri, made clear that any right cannot be divided, and any exclusion or exception of the right repudiates the principle embedded in the right itself. “If we as Lebanese suffer from racist attitudes against us, we should not practice the same racism against others, notably, Palestinians or Syrians,” Metri expounded. “What we have heard lately brought backward the debate on women’s rights which has seen a progress,” Metri said, adding, that a “right cannot be conditional, for the case of a woman married to a Syrian does not differ from a woman married to a French citizen.” It should be noted, that this same message has been brought up by the minister during the drafting of the ministerial declaration of 4 former governments he has been part of. (Al Akhbar, As Safir, L’Orient Le Jour, September 28, 2016)