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Advocacy Campaigns
WLP’s advocacy strategy is to engage in multi-year, research-intensive, grassroots-driven advocacy campaigns. Our current campaigns include:
Take Action Survey #2 to determine how nationality laws affect children's education.
Claiming Equal Citizenship: The Campaign for Arab Women’s Right to Nationality supports a six-country regional campaign to raise awareness of discriminatory laws that deny women equal nationality rights and undermine women’s status as equal citizens in their home countries. The campaign calls for legal reform allowing women to confer their nationality to their husbands and children, full implementation of reformed laws, and recognition of women as equal citizens.
Read how the Iranian Parliament is attempting to push back family legislation by 42 years.
One Million Signatures: The campaign aims to collect one million signatures to demand an end to discriminatory laws against women in Iran. At present, men have the sole right to divorce and, except in special cases, the right to custody of children. One man’s testimony equals that of two women. A daughter receives half a son’s inheritance. The campaign is a continuation of Iranian women’s century-long struggle for gender equality.
To see the state of family law in Muslim-majority countries, click here.
Family Law Reform Campaign: Moroccan women’s rights activists achieved their goal in January 2004 when the government of Morocco adopted a new landmark Family Law supporting women’s equality and granting women new rights in marriage and divorce, among others. The Family Law Reform Campaign continues in other Muslim-majority countries.
Equality Without Reservation: Eliminating Discrimination against Women in the Arab Region - Appeal to all Arab Governments for the Withdrawal of Reservations and the Ratification of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW.
News & Events
Lebanon: Women, non-Lebanese children get raw deal
IRIN
July 22, 2008
Thousands of children in Lebanon are denied full access to education, healthcare and residency because they do not have Lebanese citizenship.
Lebanese women cannot pass on their nationality to their children and in the event of separation, it is the father who gains automatic custody, according to Lebanese nationality law.
Jordan: Women seek equal rights under Citizenship Law
By Rana Husseini
28 December 2007
The Jordan Times
AMMAN - Um Omar is a Jordanian who married a Syrian construction worker 16 years ago, but four years ago, he left without notice and no one knows his whereabouts.
The 45-year-old mother of nine tried to seek government help since her children are not Jordanian citizens and cannot benefit from many privileges, but was shocked to learn that they do not support non-Jordanian offspring.
Iran: One Million Signatures to End Discrimination
by Abigail Somma
July 23, 2007
www.voices-unabridged.org
These days, when most people talk about Iran, the focus is on its nuclear program. But for a group of determined Iranian women, there’s a more pressing issue at hand. Since June 2006, human rights activists have been campaigning tirelessly for something that continues to elude Iranian women: equal rights.
The One Million Signatures Campaign or Change for Equality, started as a grassroots movement to collect a million signatures demanding the Iranian government change laws that discriminate against women.
Interview with Lina Abou-Habib, Director of CRTD-A, on Women's Right to Nationality
Interview with Lina Abou-Habib, Director of Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action (CRTD-A), March 4, 2006
By Anna Workman, Program Associate, WLP
Why is the right to nationality an important issue for women in the Middle East and North Africa?
Essentially because nationality is a case in point of how citizenship in this region is gendered.
Lebanon: Law does not recognize children of Lebanese females
CRTD-A calls for right of all Lebanese to pass on nationality
By Meris Lutz
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
March 08, 2006
International women's day
BEIRUT: "Hi, I'm Rana. This is my daughter - she's Norwegian," the young woman said, gently bouncing the baby on her lap as she passed out fliers reading "My nationality: a right for me and my family" at AUB on Tuesday.
Interview with Wajeeha Al Baharna, President of Bahrain Women's Society, on the Nationality Campaign in Bahrain
Interview with Wajeeha Al Baharna, President of the Bahrain Women's Society, March 7, 2006
By Anna Workman, Program Associate, WLP
( categories:
Advocacy Articles | Advocacy Campaigns )
Claiming Equal Citizenship: The Campaign for Arab Women’s Right to Nationality
In 2006, WLP will stand in solidarity with partners in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Gulf regions to call for women's equal citizenship rights, including equal rights to confer nationality to their spouses and children. In the majority of MENA and Gulf countries, only men have the legal right to confer nationality to non-national spouses and children.
"Nationality is a case in point of how citizenship in this region is gendered...whether or not you are a national will determine very much whether you're have the right to representation, whether you have the right to social entitlements, whether you're a full citizen or not. So when the laws in most countries in the MENA and Gulf regions say that a citizen is someone born of a father of that country only, this clearly says that the state considers that only men are real citizens," said Lina Abou-Habib, Director of WLP's Lebanese partner Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action (CRTD-A), one of the organizations leading the regional campaign for Arab women's right to nationality.
