Regional Report on Citizenship: The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) that is today found in many North African states, such as Tunisia.7 Additionally, the nationality legislation of both the French and British colonial powers at the time treated men and women differently with respect to acquisition and transferral of nationality. Post-independence, all Arab countries adopted this gender-discriminatory approach to nationality and no country allowed equal opportunity to both genders in terms of acquisition and transferral of nationality.8 The new MENA states’ nationality laws immediately disadvantaged women in their nationality legislations due to their colonial influence. Still today, more than half of the 25 countries worldwide where women cannot pass their nationality to their children on an equal basis to men are found in the MENA region.9 The colonial effect on nationality regulation is much stronger than just influencing the content of legislation. The map of the MENA region, as we know it today, is in fact relatively new. In 1920 for example, the French announced the creation of the new state of Lebanon, the territory of which had been officially under its mandate. Five years later it was actually the French High Commissioner who issued the Lebanese nationality law to this newly created Lebanese state – Decree No. 15 on Lebanese Nationality10 – which is still the same problematic law in place today. Following on from this, at the gaining of independence and the end of protectorate and mandate rule, a division of the different territories and the creation of new states and borders that had never previously existed took place.11 Many areas suddenly found themselves as a new state having to comprehend what that means. Led by rulers with lack of expertise in and experience with implementing a large bureaucratic aparatus, states faced the challenge of drawing up their own nationality regulation, which meant they had to determine who did and who did not belong to that new state, and then to implement this by documenting their populations accordingly. An example of where this led to difficulties was in Kuwait. The current Kuwaiti nationality law came into force in 1959 and pre-dates its independence from Britain (in 1961) and its constitution (which was signed in to law in 1962). With a new nationality law, the government of Kuwait had to identify who its citizens were. They opened up a registration process for individuals, however, due to various reasons such as the individual or family not understanding the importance of registering for nationality, or nomadic families not having sufficient proof of where they had been settling, a large number of people were not able to / did not register, and therefore were excluded from the nationality process. This left a substantial proportion of the population without access to Kuwaiti nationality, which the state is yet to resolve and therefore, more than half a century later, tens of thousands of these individuals remain stateless.12 Kuwait is just one example of how the break-up of the region and the 7 Article 7 of Le Code de la nationalité tunisienne 2011 states that anyone born in Tunisia to a father and a grandfather also born there will acquire Tunisian nationality 8 G. Parolin, Nationality in the Arab World. Kin, Religion and Nation State, Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 9 However the colonial influence was not directly true in the case of Iran where Iran’s nationality law was enacted under the Pahlavi monarchy in 1929. 10 M. El-Khoury and T. Jaulin, Country Report: Lebanon, EUDO Nationality Observatory, September 2012, available at: http://eudo-nationality.eu/docs/CountryReports/Lebanon.pdf. 11 For more information on this see Cole, Juan RI, and Deniz Kandiyoti. "Nationalism and the colonial legacy in the Middle East and Central Asia: Introduction." International Journal of Middle East Studies 34.2 (2002): 189-203. 12 For more information on the Bidoon of Kuwait see Human Rights Watch, Prisoners of the Past, 2011, see https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/kuwait0611WebInside.pdf RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-Comp. 2017/3- © 2017 Author(s) 3