estimated 438,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria, most of whom are likely to be stateless.9 4. This submission focuses on gender discrimination in Syria’s nationality law and its intersection with: ● Conflict-Impacted Cohorts and Displacement Contexts ● Kurdish Population ● Palestinian Population 5. This is a critical time for Syria’s transition, with nationality rights and the removal of discriminatory nationality law provisions essential to realizing an inclusive, just, and thriving society. We welcome the re-establishment of Syria’s parliament (the People’s Assembly), with the first session having been held 12 July 2026. We encourage the People’s Assembly to prioritize reforming the Nationality Law to enshrine nondiscrimination and the right to a nationality. 6. As Syrian legal experts have argued, addressing the gender discriminatory provisions in the Nationality Law is “one of the most serious tests of the concept of equal citizenship during the transitional period in Syria.10 Nationality Law: Gender Discrimination & Statelessness Gaps 7. Syria’s current nationality law,11 promulgated in 1969, contains significant discriminatory provisions and gaps that lead to statelessness and other human rights violations.12 8. Syria’s 1969 Nationality Law denies women the right to confer citizenship on their children and spouse on an equal basis with Syrian men: I. Article 3(a) states that “anyone born inside or outside the country to a Syrian Arab father…shall be considered as Syrian Arabs ipso facto”. In contrast, mothers can only pass on Syrian citizenship to their children in rare circumstances. II. Article 3(b) states that where the “legal family relationship” to a child’s father has “not been established” and the child is born inside Syria to a Syrian mother, that child is considered a Syrian citizen. This means that this only applies to children born inside Syria and to those whose fathers are unknown, not those whose fathers are stateless. Article 3(b) of the 1969 Nationality Act does not apply to the children of refugees from Syria who are born in host countries, further limiting the ability of children to acquire a nationality at birth. Furthermore, while Article 3(b) theoretically grants nationality to children of unestablished paternity, this safeguard is not being applied to children born of conflictrelated sexual violence in detention. Discriminatory administrative barriers, combined with severe state-inflicted security risks, prevent detained survivors from registering births, leaving these children structurally undocumented. III. Article 3(d) states that Syrian mothers can confer nationality if the child was born in Syria 9 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), “Where We Work,” available at: https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/syria. 10 Ibrahim Draji, The Syrian Mother’s Right to Transfer her Citizenship: Equal citizenship test in the transitional phase [paper published in Arabic], February 3026. 11 Nationality Law, Legislative Decree 276, 1969, available at: https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/4d81e7b12.pdf. 12 European Network on Statelessness and Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, “Statelessness in Syria,” August 2019, available at: https://statelessjourneys.org/wp-content/uploads/StatelessJourneys-Syria-August-2019.pdf. 2