Why is the right to nationality an important issue for women in the Middle East and North Africa?
Essentially because nationality is a case in point of how citizenship in this region is gendered. One way of actually being a citizen is being a national of a particular country, so whether or not you are a national will determine very much whether you have the right to representation, whether you have the right to social entitlements, whether you’re a full citizen or not. So when the laws in most countries in the Middle East and North Africa and Gulf regions say that a citizen is someone born of a father of that country only, this clearly says that the state considers that only men are real citizens and hence only men can pass on their citizenship to their offspring. How did the campaign for Arab Women’s Right to Nationality first get started? It started from a group of women starting to think about what citizenship meant in the context of the Arab region. Many organizations are working on the issue of the personal status code, of family law. We thought that nationality was very criti
