Thousands of Syrian Children Denied Citizenship as Women Confront Outdated Citizenship Laws
Huda Al-Omari, 24, is constantly anxious since divorcing her Iraqi husband; her daughter didn’t obtain her father’s citizenship, meaning her three-year-old daughter is now stateless and has no legal rights in Syria.
“Legally, she doesn’t even exist,” Al-Omari said.
Amid a global campaign to end statelessness within 10 years, a phenomenon that impacts over 10 million people worldwide, a United Nations report specifically noted how thousands of Syrian refugee children have been unable to acquire documentation proving their Syrian nationality.
This issue was highlighted by the Syrian North Press Agency in a report published in 2020, and a more recent report was published by the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy on the same topic.
Since the start of the Syrian war in 2011, more than 50,000 Syrian children were born in exile in neighboring countries, some to Syrian mothers and non-Syrian fathers. For those whose mothers have since divorced and returned to Syria, the struggle is even greater. The government classifies them as “unregistered” and “stateless”, leaving them in legal limbo—without rights, without a country, without a future.
Article Three of the Syrian nationality law states that “a person is considered Syrian Arab by law if born in the country or abroad to a Syrian Arab father.” When foreign fathers refuse to grant nationality to their children from Syrian ex-wives—often out of spite toward the mother—those children are left stateless.
According to Syria’s Al-Baath newspaper, citing the General Directorate of Civil Affairs, 210,566 Syrian women are married to non-Syrian men. However, there are no clear figures for unregistered cases or marriages conducted through religious contracts (performed by sheikhs without civil registration), particularly those that proliferated during the war when Syrian women married foreign fighters in areas controlled by Islamist resistance groups against the ruling regime of Bashar al-Assad, who was ousted from power in December of last year. Often, these men are known by pseudonyms, with their real names and nationalities unclear.
The number is likely much higher as over 5.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in other countries, particularly Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Germany.
“Before the war, getting married and having children were not my goal,” Al-Omari told More to Her Story. “But because of the war, marriage became a necessary evil, so I got married at 20 to escape from my family home and the deteriorating economic situation.”
Al-Omari is not alone, says Haneen Ahmad, a women’s rights activist and member of the Syrian Women’s Advisory Council and Program Director of the Nation Building Movement.
“Syrian women married to non-Syrian men struggled during the war,” said Ahmad, noting that the issue was most pronounced in areas like Idlib in northern Syria and provinces with high numbers of internally displaced people or refugees.
Ahmad says it is necessary to “gender-sensitize the Syrian constitution and laws” to ensure men’s and women’s rights are protected and equal without discrimination.
She believes the fall of the recent regime could be an opportunity to make changes to these laws.
A governing body currently run by the Syrian opposition will lead a transitional period of 18 months, including six months to draft a new constitution, which she says is the time to discuss this key issue.
“Laws that differentiate between men and women, especially regarding fundamental rights, are a form of gender-based violence," says Ahmad, “there's no difference between physically abusing a woman, verbally abusing her, or denying her one of her most basic rights, that is, granting citizenship to her children.”
Um Omar, 30, hails from Douma in eastern Ghouta, about 10 kilometers northeast of Damascus. She was unable to register her child in the Syrian civil registry. After her first husband died in 2013, her family arranged her marriage to a non-Syrian man known only as ‘Abu Omar.’
“I only knew him as Abu Omar,” recalled Um Omar, who preferred to remain anonymous. “He never revealed his real name; neither did my family. After about a year of marriage, he went to Idlib and never returned. I was one month pregnant then, and I named my son Omar after his father, who never saw him and knows nothing about him.”
Um Omar remembers how she cried when her child first said “baba,” knowing his father would never hear his voice or know him. The child is now seven years old and always asks where his father is.
“I have no answer,” Um Omar said.
Article 28 of the Syrian Personal Status Law No. 13 of 2021 says, “a child born from an unregistered marriage cannot be registered except after the marriage of the parents is officially registered.”
Ahmad says that most marriages were not officiated, which compounds the problem for Um Omar and others.
“Unregistered and unrecognized marriages, combined with laws that don't allow citizenship transfer through mothers, leave Syrian mothers in a cycle of confusion and fear about their children's future,” said Ahmad.
A 2020 analysis of the status of Syrian women pointed out that citizenship did not automatically enable women to gain access to their political, economic, cultural, or social rights, particularly due to blatant legal discrimination against women, including the denial of the right to grant citizenship to their children. This often incurs a huge financial burden on women whose children have no access to public support in education or healthcare and must pay residency fees.
Ahmad says that the nationality discrimination blatantly contradicts Article 33 of the Syrian Constitution, which explicitly states that citizens are equal in rights and duties.
The thought is terrifying for Rama, 24, who married an Emirati citizen she met at her workplace and is now pregnant with her first child.
“Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the fear of getting divorced. How can I return to Syria with a child who has no rights in a country that doesn't recognize them as a citizen or even as a person?” said Rama, who requested that we not use her full name for safety reasons.
“Most of our laws favor men over women. Socially and legally, what's permissible for a man isn't permissible for a woman,” added Rama.
A professor at Damascus University's Faculty of Law, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that Syrian law doesn't explain why citizenship rights are restricted to males, leaving the unexplained and unjustified restriction open to interpretation.
The professor said that denying Syrian mothers the right to pass citizenship on to their children is a form of social violence against women.
“Citizenship isn’t a national security secret, and granting it doesn’t reveal anything confidential. It’s a child’s right through their mother, giving them a sense of belonging to their mother’s homeland and access to all rights and freedoms.”