BEIRUT: Samira Soueidan’s story is not unusual in Lebanon. The Burj Hammoud resident fell in love, married and started a family.When her husband passed away in 1994, Soueidan was left with four children the Lebanese state viewed as foreigners. Her crime? Soueidan had married an Egyptian. While Lebanese law allows men to pass on their nationality to their non-Lebanese wives and children, it prohibits Lebanese women married to non-Lebanese from doing the same.
This discrimination is further upheld by Lebanon’s reservation on Article 2 of paragraph 9 of the UN Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, signed in 1996.
Without the proper papers, Soueidan’s children faced problems at military checkpoints, had difficulty obtaining employment or affordable education and health care, were made to undergo regular medical check-ups and blood tests, and lived with the threat of deportation every day. “They felt lost in their own country,” she told The Daily Star.
But unlike thousands of others in her situation, Soueidan successfully obtained citizenship for her children earlier this year. After seeing a television program about Lebanon’s discriminatory nationality law, she decided to sue for justice.
“All my friends and family told me not to bother as it wouldn’t change anything and would cost a lot of money, but I felt driven to,” she said.
“My children identify as being 100 percent Lebanese, they do not have any other nationality. They love their country very much and they were born and raised here entirely.”
In a landmark judgment on nationality in July, Judges John al-Azzi, Rana Habka and Lamis Kazma ruled in favor of granting Soueidan’s two sons and two daughters official recognition as Lebanese citizens.
The judges gave the 17, 19, 21 and 22-year-olds citizenship rights after concluding there was no law prohibiting a Lebanese mother from passing on her nationality to her children after the death of her husband. The judges also referred to Article 7 of the Lebanese Constitution, which notes that all Lebanese citizens have equal rights before the law.
In the ruling, the judges said many aspects of Lebanon’s nationality were “obscure” and questioned the justification for allowing only men to pass on their nationality: “Is it conceivable that Lebanese law prefers the foreign woman to the Lebanese women? No law can stipulate rights giving more protection to a foreigner than to a national,” they said.
Their strongly worded verdict, described by Soueidan as a “great joy” for her family, offered hope to thousands of individuals suffering because of Lebanon’s discriminatory legislation. These hopes, however, were quickly dashed when Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar decided to appeal the decision.
As with many things in Lebanon, reform of the nationality law has become a heavily politicized issue, revolving around the issue of whether Palestinians should be included.
Those who oppose a possible amendment have argued that the naturalization of thousands of Palestinian men and children would tip Lebanon’s delicate sectarian balance in favor of Sunni Muslims, the religion of the majority of the country’s 400,000 Palestinian refugees.
But this argument doesn’t withstand scrutiny: rights activists estimate less than 2 percent of Lebanese women are married to Palestinians. They also point out that under the country’s current nationality law, written in 1925, Lebanese men married to foreigners can pass on the citizenship to their wives and children. This surely tips the sectarian balance, too, they have argued.
With over 18,000 Lebanese women married to non-Lebanese living in Lebanon, the need for a complete revision of the nationality law is essential, said Nayla Masri, project manager at the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) “Toward Reforming the Nationality Law in Lebanon” project.
She said the number of people affected by the current legislation, including children and spouses, numbers more than 80,000. The project will be launching an awareness campaign and a major report on the issue in January 2010.
Activists have had some success in pushing for reform. An amendment in 1994 gives the child of a Lebanese mother and foreign father the right to obtain Lebanese citizenship, but only after the child’s marriage to a Lebanese citizen, and only if they live continuously in Lebanon for a least five years, including one year after marriage.
In an irony that won’t be lost on Lebanese activists, a regional campaign to amend discriminatory nationality laws initiated by the Lebanese social justice organization Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action (CRTD.A), has met with success in several Arab countries, except Lebanon. Lebanese politicians simply “don’t care” about women’s rights, said CRTD.A executive director Lina Abou-Habib .
“Very few have given indication that they are aware of any discrimination or that they are even concerned with it.”
She said the nationality law was merely the most blatant manifestation of Lebanon’s generally discriminatory attitude to women. “It’s really ironic that we pretend to be the most liberal country in the region when we’re the most patriarchal and confessional at the same time,” Abou-Habib said, noting the country’s personal status laws – which govern divorce, inheritance and custody – also favored men.
But Soueidan said that neither social indifference nor Najjar’s appeal has dampened her resolve to fight for nationality for her children: “God won this battle for us and God will win it again. What right do they have to take my children’s nationality from them?” – With additional reporting by Omar Katerji
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