WUNRN
Jordan - Information & Research
Centre - King Hussein Foundation
According to a study conducted by the Information and Research Centre (IRC)-King Hussein Foundation, into the status of families of Jordanian women married to foreigners, there is a need to amend Article 22 of the1973 Residency Law, which denies residency to the foreign husband of a Jordanian woman.....Through a new research approach, the IRC conducted the study on the children of these marriages: “Most of these children felt a sense of loss and confusion over their identity between what they considered their homeland, Jordan, and their country of nationality, i.e., their father’s country of origin,” the IRC Director highlighted.
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International Council on Human
Rights Policy
65,000 Jordanian women have husbands
and Jordanian-born children not recognized as Jordanian citizens.
© 2011 Getty Images |
By Alys Brown
In a ballroom in an
65,000 Jordanian women are in the same position as Mai, with their husbands and
Jordanian-born children not recognized as Jordanian citizens. IRC argues that
the 50 million dinar it would take to incorporate these families into the state
would be covered by the 60 million dinar direct benefit of doing so, and that
there would be greater indirect benefits.
There is a need to change Article 22 of the 1973 Residency Law,
which denies residency to the foreign husband of a Jordanian woman. “The same
article gives the interior minister the right to grant a five-year residency
permit to the foreign wife of a Jordanian man, after which she can apply for
citizenship,” IRC
Director Nermeen Murad, emphasizing the clear gender discrimination.
Even the UN is not immune to this gender discrimination: for decades the UN
Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) did not give refugee status to the
children of Palestinian refugee women who married non-refugee men. This not
only prevented the children from accessing UNRWA’s free education, health care
and social services but negated their claim to the right of return in the event
it is ever eventually implemented. UNRWA has since recognised the injustice of
this position but due to limited resources is only able to rectify it to a
limited degree.
However, in some ways Mai and Farah are lucky. If Mai had married a stateless
man, such as a Palestinian, the Jordanian law on citizenship would at least
have conveyed citizenship on her children under article
3(4) of the 1954 law: Nationality being granted too “Any person born in the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan of a mother holding Jordanian nationality and of a
father of unknown nationality or of a Stateless father or whose filiation is
not established”.
On the other hand, if Mai had married a man from a country where nationality is
conveyed only to those born in the country (jus soli – for example, Brazil)
instead of descent (jus sanguinis) her children would have been stateless,
denied a nationality altogether. Alongside the stateless populations of the
world such as the Palestinians, the Nubians of Kenya or the Rohingya of Burma,
there are many children born who have ‘slipped through the net’ of nationality.
Exactly how many, it is impossible to know given their undocumented status.
Some of them are also children who might be entitled to nationality but cannot
prove it because they are undocumented, for example the children of illegal
immigrants who do not register their children’s birth for fear of drawing
attention to their illegal status in the country. This is a denial of the most
basic of rights; we can understand the right of nationality as ‘the right to
have rights’ since rights are granted by states only to citizens. Article 15 of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has a right to a
nationality.
UNHCR has the mandate for tackling statelessness and it urges
states to sign up to the two treaties on the matter (1954
and 1961).
These treaties commit states to doing all they can to prevent statelessness by
granting citizenship both through birth and through descent and to removing
unreasonable barriers to its transmission. However, these treaties have
gathered very few signatories despite their age. Children will continue to slip
through the net until all nationality laws are standardised and gender
discrimination is eradicated. And for Mai and Farah, it may still be a long
wait until equality.