Nationality and Cases of Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa of statelessness. These standards can be found not only in a range of United Nations instruments to which a varying number of MENA states have become parties, but also in regional conventions such as the Arab Charter on Human Rights and the Covenant on the Rights of the Child in Islam. One area in which the emergence and promotion of international standards relating to nationality and statelessness has had an obvious impact is in the removal of gender discrimination from nationality laws. As discussed in detail in chapter 4, pushed by strong civil society advocacy and motivated by such instruments as CEDAW and the international spotlight which it brought to the issue, laws have been reformed in numerous MENA countries over the past decade – in particular in North Africa – to grant women equal rights with men to pass their nationality to their children, when once this was an area of firmly entrenched gender discrimination. Lastly, no discussion of the contemporary influences on law and policy in the MENA region could be complete without considering the effects of the Arab Revolution. For nationality policy, as undoubtedly also with some other issues too, the Arab Revolution has so far been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has heralded hitherto unprecedented opportunities for movement on two of most protracted situations of statelessness in the world: the stateless Kurds in Bahrain 76