Nationality not Naturalization - The Rights of Lebanese Women to Full Citizenship and to Confer their Nationality to their Children In this context, it is worth noting that the Beirut Bar Association refused to accept the membership of a naturalized person under the 1994 Decree on the grounds that the Association feared that a catastrophe might occur if citizenship was abruptly withdrawn from individuals naturalized on the basis of this Decree. The files of naturalized persons have been in the Ministry of Interior since 2004 following a request by the Consultative Council to reexamine the files to find out who is eligible for citizenship and who is not.51 Moreover, naturalized applicants for membership in the Bar Association were required to obtain a paper proving that their Lebanese nationality was not contested. Others considered that the number of those who attained Lebanese nationality under this Decree is unclear, as the Decree did not include numbers. Nevertheless, the number of naturalized persons was calculated by counting the number of pages /1280/ page and the number of lines or files per page (35 on average).54 The Council of the Bar Association also refused to allow a graduate of law to take training examinations on the grounds that she had acquired Lebanese nationality under Decree 5247 of 20 June 1994. However, she has been Lebanese for more than ten years under the civil registration record issued by the Lebanese authorities and certified by the Lebanese Ministry of Interior. Some members of the Bar Association’s Council considered that the argument that the Naturalization Decree issued in 1994 is contested, and therefore cannot be enforced, is categorically false, considering that the State of Lebanon that issued it operates and implements it and allows Lebanese naturalized persons to vote and run for parliamentary elections ten years after the Decree of their naturalization, excluding alien women married to Lebanese, who have become Lebanese through this marriage. This provision is clear and unequivocal in more than one law, decree and decision, and the most recent law in this regard is Law 44 concerning the election of members of the House of Representatives, promulgated on 17 June 2017 and published in Official Gazette 27, issued exceptionally on Saturday, 17 June 2017, where its fifth article stipulated that “a naturalized Lebanese citizen is not entitled to vote or run for office until ten years since the implementation of the Naturalization Decree ...”, So, how does the Lebanese State implement an explicit decree and is rejected by an Association that is supposed to watch over the proper implementation of laws, even if it is disputed for sectarian reasons?52 Former Minister of the Interior Bechara Merhej also confirmed that the actual number of naturalized persons in the 1994 Decree was about 152,000 between adults and minors, based on stakeholders’ requests until 1993.55 (b) Discrepancies in the numbers of naturalized persons The above confirms the absence of precise and detailed figures for the number of naturalized persons by Decree 5247 of 1994 and the absence of a detailed breakdown of these figures based on gender, legal status, nationality, denomination/religion. This is the case with subsequent decrees. All of this requires the adoption of a statistical system to enable and ensure the acquisition of accurate information and figures in order to propose and approve appropriate laws and develop matching development programmes. Most importantly, it is not to allow discretionary freedom to issue positions, decisions, and policies that may not correspond to reality, especially concerning Lebanese women married to foreigners. To date, no one has been able to quantify the number of naturalized persons in Lebanon. Some say that it has reached the limits of 400,000 persons and others claim that it has reached 800,000. However, the reality indicates that these figures are wildly exaggerated and that the actual number is, at best, only 200,000. That being said, the official statistics from the Directorate General of Personal Status show that the number of persons who have obtained citizenship through the Decree is close to 153,452.53 A study by lawyer Elias Bou Nassif was published in the Journal of Justice — page 77 entitled Direct Nationality and Naturalization — Observations on Naturalization Decree 5247 of 20 June 1994, indicating that the number of persons who acquired Lebanese nationality reached 1.5 million. The retired Brigadier General of the Internal Security Forces, Dr. Fadl Zaher, who was charged with overseeing the implementation stages of the Naturalization Decree following its promulgation (1994), stated that the number of files covered by the Naturalization Decree of 1994 was about 53,000 (each file contains a family of between one and twelve persons), indicating that if this number is multiplied by an average of 5.4 family members listed in the files, the result will be that the number of naturalized persons is estimated at 238,550. Former Minister of Interior and Municipalities, Ahmed Fatfat, submitted a report in early 2006 to the National Dialogue Table, in a first step of its kind, indicating that citizenship had been granted to people from 80 countries. According to the report, the number of persons who acquired citizenship was approximately 203,000 and distributed by religious denomination as follows:56 • Total Muslims 159,011 naturalized persons (Sunni-ShiiteAlawite, Druze). • T̀otal Christians 43,516 naturalized persons (from different Christian denominations). 13