Children of Nationals but Stateless : An Analysis of the Maintenance of Gender-based Discriminatory Nationality Laws

Abstract

Numerous countries in the world, concretely twenty-four at the moment, continue to display nationality laws that discriminate against women, preventing them from conferring their nationality on their children. This leads very often to statelessness if the father is neither able to pass his nationality or is stateless himself. And, even if they do have a nationality through their father, the children affected by these laws are still considered foreigners and thus, become deprived of significant rights in their mother’s nation, where they are marginalized and restricted in their access to basic services, from education to healthcare. Before the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979, the majority of states did not provide equal rights to women in nationality matters. This has changed since then. However, the aim of this thesis is to assess the reasons that impede positive reforms in countries where a change has not yet been achieved. With that purpose in mind, the present study uses different approaches: the kin contract by Suad Joseph and the continuum of violence by Liz Kelly on one hand, and gendered nationalism theories developed by Nina Yuval-Davis and Joane Nagel on the other. Moreover, it relies on different sources of data (interviews, draft law proposals, reports, and news articles from Lebanon and Nepal, with further examples from Somalia, Jordan, Kuwait, and Malaysia) analyzed through the lenses of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) to entangle the factors that contribute to the maintenance of these rules and the continuation of violence against women (and hence, their families) in nationality-related issues. Expanding previous research, this work suggests that discriminatory nationality laws are still in place not only because of patriarchal attitudes that keep constraining women’s rights, particularly in patrilineal kin-based societies, but similarly, because they are used as part of an immigration control strategy, that exclusively targets women and which objective is to avoid the settlement of foreign populations in the territory.