Report on Citizenship Law Syria Zahra Albarazi 1. Introduction Syria has a complicated relationship with defining the citizens of the State, having both gone through many stages of occupation and being home to many diverse populations. Prior to the 2011 uprising starting and the conflict that has followed, Syria was a country with various historical challenges with how it has organized its nationality legislation and the implementation of it. This includes both gaps in the nationality legislations – such as discriminatory clauses – and practice that has excluded groups from the citizenry. This has meant that there are many hundreds and thousands of individuals inside of Syria who have been left without a nationality. For instance, alongside the estimated three hundred thousand Kurds deprived of citizenship, a population of just under half a million Palestinian refugees from Syria are also considered as stateless. Of course, the conflict has exacerbated some of negative consequences of the gaps in the law. This is particularly true due to the discriminatory legal provisions and practices which mean mothers are unable to pass on nationality to their children on an equal basis with fathers, creating further cases and risks of statelessness for the millions of children of displaced or otherwise conflict-affected mothers. There are multiple flaws in Syria’s citizenship regime and many examples that show how citizenship as well as statelessness have been used as a political tool at the disposal of the state. When exploring the historical events of groups acquiring and groups being deprived of nationality political motives are clear. Palestinians, for example, trace their lack of citizenship back to state succession, the formation of the Israeli state in 1948. Many were displaced to Syria and hundreds of thousands live in the country without having been able to access Syrian nationality, similarly to those who went to other countries in the region.1 There has been no effort by the current regime or regionally to modify this. Furthermore, sections of Syria’s Kurds attribute their statelessness to discrimination at the hands of the Syrian state and its exclusionary ideology of Arab nationalism. They became stateless due to a census in 1962 which was designed to deprive them of citizenship and deprived hundreds of thousands of future generations access to citizenship. Clearly, Syria also has a complicated relationship with citizenship criteria and certain groups. One of the current challenges is that there are very limited statistics that stem from Syria with regards to citizenship issues. There are, for example, no statistics on the number of individuals who apply for citizenship, how many are afforded it, or reliable government statistics on the number of individuals who are stateless in the country.2 1 F. Albanese and L. Takkenberg, Palestinian Refugees in International Law (Oxford University Press 2020). The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which is the UN body responsible for statelessness, places the current number of stateless persons in the country as 160,000: Global Trends in 2019: https://www.unhcr.org/5ee200e37.pdf. This figure does not include stateless Palestinians. 2 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2021/15 - © 2021 Author(s) 1