Gender Discrimination creating statelessness 16. While being gender discriminatory, Syrian nationality law does – on the face of it – provide a partial safeguard against statelessness. Article 3(b) of the Syrian Nationality Law Legislative Decree 275 1969 provides an exception to the above, by prescribing that “Anyone born in the country to a Syrian Arab mother and whose legal family relationship to his father has not been established” may also acquire Syrian nationality. Furthermore, Article 3(d) states that nationality will be granted to “anyone born in the country and was not, at the time of his birth, entitled to acquire a foreign nationality by virtue of his parentage”. 17. However, these exceptions do not remedy the gender discriminatory nature of the law and as they are rarely implemented in practice, they also do not safeguard against statelessness. One of the fundamental consequences of this discrimination is that it results in statelessness of children who cannot acquire their father’s nationality or any other. The inability to acquire nationality through the father could be due to a variety of reasons: for example, when the father is himself stateless, deceased, unwilling or unable to cooperate to take the required administrative steps. Significantly, gender discrimination in nationality laws can perpetuate statelessness across generations, as male children who are rendered stateless through this provision will go on to have their own stateless children who cannot access nationality even if their mother is a citizen. The danger of intergenerational statelessness is further exacerbated by the existence of other stateless populations in Syria as well as challenges related to registration, documentation and proof of identity. Consequently, it is evident that gender discrimination in Syria’s nationality law (in violation of the State’s commitments under CEDAW, ICCPR and CRC) results also in statelessness, in violation of Syria’s obligations under the CRC and ICCPR to ensure that no child is born stateless in the country. 18. The Syrian conflict has added a further dimension to the statelessness consequences of Syria’s gender discriminatory nationality law. This conflict has created over 9 million refugees and internally displaced persons.11 The forced displacement of such a huge proportion of the population has meant that the risks of statelessness are being amplified and transferred across borders and over generations. Due to the violent nature of the conflict, tens of thousands of Syrian fathers who are deceased, fighting, missing, imprisoned, displaced etc., have not been present at the birth of their children. This makes it extremely difficult to establish a child’s legal link to a Syrian father, heightening the risk of statelessness. Consequently, many children born both in exile and inside Syria, have no proof of paternity. Lacking identity documents, these children face additional obstacles to movement inside the country, including obstacles in fleeing areas under siege. Furthermore, with some countries only permitting asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, Syrians with a legitimate claim to asylum may be unable to access this status. This is not a problem that is small in scale, as estimates now show that over 145,000 Syrian refugee households in neighbouring countries, more than a quarter of the half a million households overall, are headed by women without the father present.12 19. The creation of statelessness in Syria, adds another layer of vulnerability to Syrian refugees and their children born abroad. While international law obligates refugee receiving states to provide comprehensive protection to all refugees in a manner which takes into account and addresses further vulnerabilities such as statelessness, the generation of statelessness as a result of Syria’s gender discriminatory nationality law does further complicate an already extremely difficult 11 12 For more information of forced displacement as a result of the Syria conflict, see http://syrianrefugees.eu/. UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Woman Alone: The fight for survival by Syria's refugee women, 2 July 2014, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/53be84aa4.html