24. Articles 16 and 18 of the 2010 Amendment establish the parameters for the conferral of nationality to spouses of Mauritanian men, and the naturalisation of non-nationals, including those married to Mauritanian citizens. A foreign woman married to a Mauritanian man may acquire Mauritanian nationality upon application after five years of marriage and residency in the country. The spouse of a Mauritanian woman can apply for naturalisation under normal procedures after residency in the country for five years. 25. In addition, under Article 18, no one may be naturalised unless they have had habitual residence in Mauritania for at least ten years, unless the person in question was born in Mauritania or married in accordance with Sharia to a Mauritanian, in which case only five years are required. Another criteria for naturalisation is fluency in a national language. In this regard, the 2010 Amendment removed French and Bambara from the list of national languages, thereby imposing a barrier to naturalisation for French and Bambara speakers. 26. Article 58 of the Amendment stipulates that birth and marriage have effect in regards to matters of nationality, only if they are established by act of civil status. Statelessness in Mauritania 27. There are no official statistics for the number of stateless people in Mauritania but in 2014, there were 13,703 refugees from Mauritania in Senegal, 12,897 in Mali and over 5,000 in France.19 It is considered unlikely that they are currently recognised as nationals by Mauritania. It has therefore been estimated that there are likely to be around 30,000 or so Black Mauritanians living in exile who are stateless refugees.20 28. Below, are some profiles of groups at risk of statelessness and the main causes of statelessness in the country, which are also addressed through this submission: I. II. III. IV. Mauritania is still in the process of repatriating ‘Black Mauritanians’ who were rendered stateless following an inter-communal conflict in Mauritania in 1989. At the time, the government arbitrarily denationalised over 60,000 'Black Mauritanians', leaving them stateless, and simultaneously expelled them from the country. 21 The Haratine, black African communities of slaves or former slaves, face persistent discrimination. This community lacks access to citizenship and therefore to all state’s services and basic rights such as health and education, with some schools branches rejecting students from this community. At the same time, languages commonly spoken by this community – such as Hassanya, Pular, Wolof, and/or Soninké – are considered dialects and are not used in formal education. This discrimination persists through adulthood and is reflected in the country’s political representation. Only lightskinned Moors are promoted to high office and Arabic is the official language. Mauritania’s nationality law denies Mauritanian women equal rights with men to confer nationality on children and spouses. This can lead to statelessness and also forms part of a much wider and pervasive discrimination against women in the country. Children face the risk of statelessness, both due to discriminatory laws and practices related to birth registration (which disadvantage children born out of wedlock, and the children of refugees), and due to the lack of a safeguard against intergenerational statelessness – as the law presumes that at least one parent will be a Mauritanian 19 https://files.institutesi.org/worldsstateless.pdf. Ibid. 21 Ibid. 20 6