What is this “higher interest” that prevents a mother passing her nationality to her children?

“Is considered Lebanese:

• Every person born of a Lebanese father;
• Every person born in the territory of Greater Lebanon who did not acquire a foreign nationality upon birth through affiliation;
• Every person born in the territory of Greater Lebanon to unknown parents or to parents of unknown nationality.”

Some eighty-seven years later this decree, issued by the High Commissioner of the Republic of France to the countries of Syria, Greater Lebanon, the Alawites and the Djebel Druze, remains in force. The view taken by the recently resigned government’s deputy prime minister was in accordance with that of five of its ministers (the ministers of labour, the interior, the foreign office, justice and media) to wit: not to interfere with the law and to maintain Lebanese citizenship as a privilege for the offspring of Lebanese men alone. This was revealed in a report issued by a ministerial committee formed by the cabinet on March 22, 2012 (and including, in addition to the above named ministers, the Minister of Social Affairs) for the purpose of reviewing a draft law that sought to amend the final paragraph of Article 4 of Decree No.15 (The Nationality Law).

The issue that the committee was supposed to be examining, and concerning which it was to deliver its recommendation to the government, was whether or not to amend General Saray’s conditions for obtaining Lebanese nationality. The committee’s members voted unanimously in the negative and recommended that the government (that is, Mikati’s recently resigned government) “not approve” the draft law in question. 

Returning to the background of this committee being formed it is important to note that the Ministry of the Interior, keen to respond to the demands of civil society and update legislation, had already proposed two possible formulations for an amendment to the Nationality on April 27, 2009. Formulation A proposed the following text for the final paragraph of Article 4:

“Likewise, a Lebanese woman married to a foreign man has the right to grant her children Lebanese nationality.”

Formulation B, on the other hand, proposed no amendments to the article in question, merely the addition of a legal phrase which confirmed that,

“Cancelling all other legal texts on the matter, any man born of a Lebanese mother shall be considered Lebanese on the condition that the father’s nationality is accredited by a recognized state and is not in conflict with constitutional rulings concerning the rejection of naturalization.”

On May 25, 2009, the file was returned to the Ministry of the Interior and Municipalities with a written explanation of the then prime minister’s reasons for not supporting an approach which would ultimately lead to treating Lebanese wives of foreign nationals differently in order for them to obtain Lebanese nationality for their children. On July 15, 2011, the Interior Ministry re-tabled the issue before the cabinet, expressing its approval for an emendation to the Nationality Law based on Formulation B so that, “its content remain in keeping with the preamble to the constitution, which prohibits naturalization.” 

The National Association for Lebanese Women’s Affairs, which acts in an advisory capacity to government ministries and institutions, lent its support to calls by non-governmental women’s groups to recognize a mother’s right to pass her nationality to her children. On June 12, 2012, it presented cabinet with a draft law recognizing this right for Lebanese women married to foreigners, with special provisions to expedite the cases of children born to Lebanese mothers of Palestinian fathers, which would guarantee their acquisition of Lebanese nationality on reaching legal age, as long as they met the conditions regarding continuous residence in Lebanon and had committed no crime or serious felony.

The mother’s right or that of her children?

Article 4 of Decree No.15 1925 states that,

“The spouse of a foreigner who has become a Lebanese citizen as well as the legally competent children of such a foreigner may, if they so request, obtain Lebanese nationality without satisfying the conditions of residence, whether by virtue of the regulation granting this nationality to the husband, father or mother or in a special regulation. Likewise, the minors of a father acquiring Lebanese nationality or a mother acquiring said nationality, and who remained alive after the death of the father, shall become Lebanese unless they reject this nationality within a year of reaching legal age.”

Ironically, when the cabinet took the decision to form the ministerial committee on March 21, 2012, for the purposes of reviewing Article 4, it did not instruct it to examine Article 1 (quoted above). Its sole instruction was to, “study a draft law proposing the amendment of the final paragraph of Article 4 of Decree No.15, dated January 19, 1925, and forward all recommendations to the cabinet.” As is clear from the above, by confining the committee’s remit to Article 4 of the current Nationality Law, the cabinet made this more an issue of “obtaining” Lebanese nationality than of acknowledging Lebanese women citizenship rights on equal terms with their male counterparts. This bias was reflected in the committee’s findings and embedded a number of contradictions in its stated reasoning. The committee’s remit ignored the existence of Formulation B, which the Interior Ministry had approved in 2011, just as it ignored women’s demands to investigate the issue of unrestricted citizenship rights for women.

Painful reasoning

The reasoning set out by the committee in its report only served to stoke feelings of injustice among those calling for the reform of political practices in Lebanon as well as women’s rights advocates. The committee invoked “the higher interests of the state” to justify its failure to grant Lebanese mothers the right to transfer their nationality to their children. The committee was “unanimous” in reaching this conclusion, using arguments whose soundness was disputed by the National Association for Lebanese Women’s Affairs in a legal study it forwarded to the prime minister, requesting him to review the issue of the requested emendation to the Nationality Law and to “give the concept of Lebanese citizenship some actual content.” 

The study gave a detailed response to the reasoning set out by the committee and gave special emphasis to the following considerations:

1. The principle that Palestinians shall not be naturalized (as implied in article [i] of the constitution’s preamble) means that not one Palestinian residing in Lebanese territory may be granted Lebanese nationality, without exception. This seems to contradict the allowance made to the children of a Lebanese woman and Palestinian father, that they may assume the nationality of their mother, since it introduces a classification that does not treat all Palestinians equally under the law.
2. It is unjust to make Lebanese women responsible both for attaining a balance in the Christian and Muslim populations and for the consequences of this equation for the constitutionally ratified structures of the state. Likewise, it is unjust that Lebanese women must pay the price for the Lebanese legislature’s inability to draw up an electoral law free of sectarian constraints.
3. It is incorrect to use Ruling 2/2001 of the Constitutional Council to justify a refusal to adopt the constitutional principles of equality and lack of discrimination, by referring to the “higher interests of the state”, since this very ruling, which barred Palestinians from the right to own private property (based on the non-naturalization principle) referred in its text to Article 7 of the constitution, which states that the right to equality is restricted to Lebanese citizens. It is thus incorrect to use “the higher interests of the state” as an argument for abrogating the right to equality, when it is Lebanese women who are demanding rights equal to those enjoyed by men in passing their nationality on to their children.

The committee’s use of “higher interests” here, which it claims support its refusal to grant Lebanese woman the right to pass on their nationality to their children in order to address demands to prevent Palestinians from naturalizing and check the imbalance in the relative sectarian populations within the country, increases the sense of dispossession felt by all Lebanese. Today, these same Lebanese citizens discover that, thanks to this report from the ministerial committee, it is not only their national security that will be decided on by consensus, but now their human rights as well.

Is this just frustration speaking? No, just the ever deepening realization that the time has come for both citizens and the political class alike to be courageous and make a sincere effort to renew the legal structures that govern them. When the nationality Law was drawn up in the 1920s the women’s movement was fighting to eradicate illiteracy among women; today, the universities throng with excellent female students of whom Lebanon is proud. Why then bury our heads in the sands of the past and claim that “the higher interests of the state” bar them from one of the basic rights of citizenship?