Daily Star - UAE decision on nationality law highlights need for new approach, December 2, 2011

Olivia Alabaster

BEIRUT: As the United Arab Emirates became the eighth Arab state to grant equal nationality rights to women Wednesday, campaigners in Lebanon warn the domestic struggle still has some way to go.

Currently, Lebanese women who marry foreigners can’t pass their nationality onto their children, unlike Lebanese men. Activists have been campaigning on the issue for years, having first presented a draft law to Parliament in 2005.

Ghida Anani, founder and director of Abaad, a Beirut-based regional gender research center, said the UAE decision might give some encouragement to other Arab countries, but that Lebanon was a very different scenario.

“Here we have the issue of the Palestinians, of confessionalism, and of quotas,” said Anani.

Many believe the introduction of the law would lead to the naturalization of Palestinian refugees married to Lebanese women, however a U.N. study showed in 2010 that only 18,000 Lebanese women had married non-Lebanese men between 1995 and 2008.

The campaign in Lebanon, Anani believes, needs a fresh approach.

“The campaign is losing momentum. I sense there is frustration and activists are not pushing hard enough on decision-makers.

“We need new and concrete arguments,” Anani added. “Politicians must be lobbied.”

Metn MP Ghassan Moukheiber, a member of Parliament’s Human Rights Committee who has publicly supported the nationality campaign for years, agrees that the struggle needs a new angle.

“We must find a solution to this problem, but this will only happen if we have a dialogue which addresses the concerns and fears of the people and the parliamentarians,” he said.

“We need to sit down with the key players and conduct straight talk about how we can improve the lives of Lebanese women,” he said. “We need to discuss the problems that no one wants to talk about publicly.”

Lina Abou Habib, executive director of the Collective for Research and Training on Development – Action, a Beirut-based regional gender equality center, sees encouragement in September’s decision by Labor Minister Charbel Nahhas to grant the right to work to the non-Lebanese spouses and children of Lebanese women.

CRTD is continuing to lobby MPs to study the draft law and is also conducting an extensive study on the daily ramifications that the absence of such a law has on the lives of Lebanese women.

The center is also encouraging Lebanese women to “be more vocal in demanding their rights. To consider what are the potentials and possibilities of active citizenship,” Habib said.

“I do believe there are solutions to these problems,” Moukheiber said, “We just need to find them.”