A while ago, I mentioned a popular campaign for granting Lebanese women who are married to foreigners equal rights in terms of citizenship for their children. Current citizenship law states that any person born of a Lebanese father is entitled to citizenship.A parliamentary committee has been set up to propose a change to the law. Now you might think, "why on earth do they need a committee to add two words to a law?" After all, all we need to fix this is add the words "or mother" to that law and all will be well.
Turns out, someone in the committee proposed adding an exception: Lebanese women married to Palestinian men. Their rationale is that allowing these women to give Lebanese citizenship to their children is essentially a form of "Tawteen" (Arabic for "nationalization" which has become a Lebanese political taboo word meaning granting citizenship to Palestinian refugees).
The weird thing is that opponents of this essentially racist exception aren't so much concerned with arguing that this exception is inherently wrong and unjust, but rather they are arguing that it isn't really necessary "protect" the Lebanese from Tawteen. So the committee, and this is the funny part, decided to conduct a survey to see how many Palestinian children might benefit from this law. You know... to see if there is a real risk of Tawteen.
It seems the committee has totally forgotten the reason they're doing what they're doing. The whole point of the amendment was to bring about equality in rights between Lebanese men and women. And although injustice against the Palestinians themselves in terms of their civil rights is far from uncommon in Lebanon, extending the inequality to include Lebanese nationals married to Palestinians is new. And quite scary. We're not even talking about equality between men and women anymore... We're talking about equality between Lebanese women, based on who they're married to.
It seems that for some people, avoiding Tawteen is more important than justice and equality. The fact that this is even a legitimate debate is shameful.
Info and photo from: Al-Akhbar (arabic).
