New York — Around a quarter of countries still have nationality laws that deny women the same rights as men to acquire, retain, or change their citizenship, or to pass citizenship onto their children or foreign spouses.
Catherine Harrington, Campaign Manager for the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights. Credit: Ava McLaughlin Gagliardi
These legal inequalities expose women and their families to a wide range of harms. From forced family separation and statelessness to limiting access to education, healthcare, and employment, the consequences are severe and far-reaching.
While some countries have taken commendable steps to reform discriminatory nationality laws, many governments have yet to take meaningful action, leaving millions without equal rights to acquire or confer nationality. Beyond the profound impact on individuals, this discrimination carries deep social and economic costs.
When women are denied equal nationality rights, entire families are held back, restricting their ability to contribute fully to society and ultimately holding back national development.
Model guidelines for nationality laws
A new publication, “Proposed Select Draft Articles on Nationality Rights to Ensure Gender Equality,” by Equality Now and the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights (GCENR), provides model guidelines for policymakers to reform and enact nationality laws that ensure all citizens, regardless of their gender, have access to equal citizenship rights.
GCENR, housed at Women’s Refugee Commission, is a coalition of independent activists, UN partner agencies, and national and international organisations working to end gender discrimination in nationality laws. Equality Now is a founding steering committee member of GCENR.
Catherine Harrington, Campaign Manager of GCENR, spoke to Equality Now about why gender-equal nationality laws are crucial to building an inclusive, thriving, and prosperous society for all.
What are the real-life consequences for women and girls when nationality laws are not gender equal?
Women’s unequal status in society is the root cause of gender-based violence. At a foundational level, discriminatory nationality laws create a conducive environment for gender-based violence. For example, a woman and her children’s nationality being dependent on an abusive spouse creates a higher barrier for them to leave a situation of domestic violence.
The inability to confer nationality on children and non-citizen spouses inhibits women’s power to choose their partners. It undermines equality in the family, affecting women’s autonomy and ability to form a family.
Statelessness also exacerbates certain risks. For example, a girl born to a Lebanese mother and a stateless Palestinian father in Lebanon would be rendered stateless. She can’t gain Lebanese citizenship through her mother, even if she lives there and cannot acquire another nationality. This puts her at an increased risk of human trafficking and child marriage because, unfortunately, some families see early and enforced marriage as a pathway to secure documentation or citizenship.
Risks extend to the world of work. Lack of formal employment pushes many affected women into informal work environments, making them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, including sexual harassment and assault by employers. Due to their undocumented status, many don’t report or seek justice for the violence they face.
What’s the objective of the model guidelines published by GCENR and Equality Now, and how can policymakers use them?
Gender discrimination in nationality laws is the canary in the coal mine for gender equality. When nationality laws discriminate on the basis of gender, they implicitly ascribe women a second-class status. The guidelines examine different elements of nationality laws and propose how the law should look to uphold comprehensive gender equality.
It provides helpful context for policymakers, outlining countries’ existing obligations to uphold gender-equal nationality laws through a range of international human rights conventions, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The good news is that reforming nationality laws is pretty straightforward. Countries must simply ensure that provisions related to acquiring, changing, retaining, or conferring nationality, whether to a child or a non-national spouse, uphold the rights of all citizens equally. They can achieve it through gender-neutral language, like referring to everyone as ‘citizens’ or using inclusive terms like ‘parent’ or ‘spouse.’ If gendered terms are used, ensure both terms, such as ‘mother and father’ or ‘wife and husband’, are included.
What are some of the barriers to adopting gender-equal nationality laws?
Xenophobia is one of the biggest challenges we face in most countries. Wherever I’ve visited, be it a rich or a poor country, I often hear the same argument from those opposed to reform.”Our situation is unique. And because of that, we must protect other people from getting our citizenship.”
Nepal, for example, shares open borders with two big countries, India and China. Some people there argue that “they’ll invade the country through the womb.” The economic argument of some countries is that citizenship comes with many benefits, and they don’t want to spend all those resources on outsiders.
Regardless of the desire not to allow others to come in, in most countries, if a man marries a woman from another country, he can confer nationality to his wife. His children automatically become citizens because it’s treated as a man’s natural right.
But when it comes to women, there is an intersection of xenophobia with deeply rooted patriarchal mindsets and sexism. The desire to make it harder for others to get citizenship is seen as more important than ensuring equal rights for women.
The irony is that discriminatory nationality laws inhibit sustainable development and exacerbate poverty. They undermine countries’ commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), especially SDG 5 on gender equality, SDG 10 on reducing inequalities, and target 16.9 on ensuring legal identity for all by 2030.
When statelessness gets passed down from parent to child, it creates multigenerational poverty. An entire population of children will grow up without equal access to education. In adulthood, they won’t have access to employment and membership in professional syndicates, required in some countries to practice certain professions such as law, engineering, architecture, or medicine. At a societal level, we’ll have all these talented individuals who genuinely want to contribute economically to the countries they call home, but are prevented from doing so.
What progress has there been in ending gender discrimination in nationality laws?
Since the launch of our global nationality campaign, we’ve seen progress in many countries. Recently, the national campaign of our coalition member Family Frontiers, led by impacted mothers, has had a remarkable influence in Malaysia. In 2024, both houses of Malaysia’s Parliament passed a constitutional amendment to uphold Malaysian women’s right to confer citizenship to their children born abroad on an equal basis with men, which will hopefully come into effect this year.
Madagascar, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have eliminated laws that denied women’s right to confer nationality on their children. While Lesotho, Benin, and Niger had already eliminated provisions preventing women from passing nationality to their children, they have now taken the final step to amend laws prohibiting women from conferring nationality on a spouse on an equal basis with men.
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Eswatini is the only country in southern Africa where women still cannot pass citizenship to their children. During the UNHCR’s High-Level Segment on Statelessness, Eswatini’s government pledged to eliminate this discrimination by 2024. While that reform hasn’t happened yet, the pledge remains a significant step forward.
Today, 90% of countries uphold women’s right to pass citizenship to their children on an equal basis with men, and three-quarters have achieved comprehensive gender equality in their nationality laws. These governments amended their laws because they recognised it was the smart thing to do. Countries yet to enact reforms must learn from the good examples and understand that it’s not something to be feared but an opportunity to uphold equality and inclusive development for all citizens.
Equality Now is a worldwide human rights organisation dedicated to securing the legal and systemic change needed to end discrimination against all women and girls. Since its inception in 1992, it has played a role in reforming 120 discriminatory laws globally, positively impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of women and girls, their communities and nations, both now and for generations to come.
Working with partners at national, regional and global levels, Equality Now draws on deep legal expertise and a diverse range of social, political and cultural perspectives to continue to lead the way in steering, shaping and driving the change needed to achieve enduring gender equality, to the benefit of all.
For more details, go to www.equalitynow.org, Bluesky equalitynow.bsky.social, Facebook @equalitynoworg, Instagram @equalitynoworg, and LinkedIn Equality Now.
Proposed Select Draft Articles on Nationality Rights to Ensure Gender Equality.
IPS UN Bureau