Liberia has amended its nationality law to grant women and men equal rights to confer nationality to their children.
Its parliament amended the Aliens and Nationality Law on August 5, removing gender-discriminatory provisions that prevented children from acquiring the nationality of their mother.
President George Weah has since assented to it, a move that has received accolades from women and gender activists in the country and beyond.
Campaign
Liberia is the third country to reform legislation to grant women and men equal rights in passing on their nationality to their children since the #IBelong Campaign to end Statelessness by 2024 was launched in 2014, following Madagascar and Sierra Leone.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has applauded Liberia’s move.
“Gender discrimination in nationality laws remains a primary cause of statelessness among children, and this development speaks to Liberia’s commitment to tackling this issue,” said Gillian Triggs, the UN Refugee Agency’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection.
Ms Triggs added that UNHCR will continue working with governments to end statelessness and address its root causes.
Other countries
Following the passage of an amended Citizenship Act in 2017, Sierra Leone now guarantees women and men equal right to confer nationality on children. Prior to the July 5 reform, the Citizenship Act of 1973 (amended 2006), denied Sierra Leonean women the right to confer nationality on their children born abroad, a right that was reserved for men.
In January 2017, Madagascar enacted a new nationality law, which guarantees women and men equal right to confer nationality on children.
The US Supreme Court also in 2017 struck down a provision that denied unmarried fathers the right to pass citizenship to their children on an equal basis with mothers.
Also read: Mind stateless persons in the country
The law, which was first enacted in 1940, is one of the few federal laws that continued to explicitly discriminate based on sex and treated US citizen fathers and mothers differently.
The case centred on Luis Ramon Morales-Santana, a US resident for more than 40 years, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1962. His father, a US citizen, later married his mother, a citizen of the Dominican Republic, and they moved to the US.
At the time of Morales-Santana’s birth, the statute provided that the child of an unmarried US citizen mother living abroad automatically became a US citizen, so long as the mother previously lived in the US for one year at any age.
On the other hand, an unmarried US citizen father could transmit citizenship to his child born abroad only if the father had resided in the US for 10 years, with five of those years occurring after the father was 14 years old.
Some 24 countries in the world today continue to have gender discriminatory provisions in their nationality laws regarding a mother’s right to pass on nationality to her children.
Statelessness affects millions of people worldwide. Without a nationality, they are often denied legal rights and access to documentation and critical services, including education, healthcare and vaccinations. Their lack of nationality can negatively impact all aspects and phases of their lives, from birth to death.
Worrying statistics
According to estimates by UNHCR, at least 10 million people around the world are stateless, but the real number may be much higher. West Africa has at least 1.6 million stateless people or people of undetermined nationality, according to governments’ figures.
In Africa, those most affected by statelessness include the descendants of colonial-era migrants, nomadic pastoralists, populations divided by arbitrary colonial borders or affected by more recent transfers of sovereignty, and those displaced by conflict.
Over the past century, an overwhelming majority of countries have enacted reforms to enshrine equal nationality rights for women and men, with discriminatory citizenship laws largely having been a legacy of colonial rule and legal systems that denied women voting and other rights. BY DAILY NATION