Nationality and Cases of Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa Introduction Soumaya is a Syrian woman and used to be an accountant. Today she lives in Lebanon as a refugee. She has three children, and a deceased husband. She has no job. As you can imagine, the situation is not currently easy for Soumaya. Whilst trying to bring bread to the table at the end of her last pregnancy, she was not preoccupied with the idea of registering the birth of little Sami when he was born. Nor did she bring documents from Syria to show who her husband was, as she was overwhelmed with the demands and needs of life in exile and displacement.   Although she did not know this before the birth of Sami, Syrian law does not allow her to give her nationality to her child. This is because she is a woman. She has no documents to prove that her new-born is the son of a Syrian male citizen.   She herself is a citizen of Syria, an inhabitant of Lebanon, a victim of the conflicts in the region, and now a woman who has to grapple with how to deal with a child who holds no nationality anywhere.1 Conflicting laws, discrimination, and administrative discrepancies have left hundreds of thousands of 1 - Interview with Soumaya in Beirut,10th November 2015 8