Rights and Welfare of the Child, which highlights the importance of birth registration
under Article 6.
16. Togo is also a member of ECOWAS and is a signatory to the Abidjan Declaration of
Ministers of ECOWAS Member States on Eradication of Statelessness, a commitment by
all ECOWAS members to take concrete action to combat statelessness including by
ensuring women and men have equal rights to acquire, change and retain their
nationality and to confer nationality.
17. Togo has not acceded to the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons
or the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.
Gender Discrimination in the Nationality Law
18. The Togolese Constitution, Nationality Code, Children’s Act and Code of Persons and the
Family all contain provisions pertaining to nationality rights. Notably, several of these
legal texts retain gender-discriminatory provisions that contradict the rights enshrined
in other, more recent legal sources, including those pertaining to women’s ability to
confer nationality on children and to retain nationality without discrimination on the
basis of marital status. The Nationality Code also includes gender-discriminatory
provisions pertaining to the right of a citizen to confer nationality on a noncitizen spouse.
19. Articles 5 and 12 of the Nationality Code of Togo do not allow women to transfer their
nationality to noncitizen spouses on an equal basis with men. Togolese men may
transfer their nationality to their foreign spouse automatically at the time of marriage.
Additionally, under Article 23, foreign women who take their Togolese husband’s
nationality may lose their Togolese nationality upon termination of the marriage.
Although the Constitution (Article 32) and the Children’s Act (Article 17) both provide
for equal nationality rights in relation to the conferral of nationality on children by
Togolese citizens, Article 3 of the nationality code also discriminates against Togolese
women by denying women the right to confer nationality on their children, unless the
father is stateless or unknown. The Togolese Nationality Code must be brought into
alignment with the Constitution and Children’s Act to uphold women’s equal right to
confer nationality.
20. By denying women equal nationality rights with men, the Togolese Nationality Code
undermines women’s status as equal citizens and violates international law, as well as
the Togolese Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law of all citizens
without distinction, including on the basis of sex.
21. Though the effects of the provision that causes naturalized Togolese women to
automatically lose their nationality in cases of divorce are mitigated by the 2012 Code
of Persons and the Family, which states that divorce has no effect on the nationality
rights acquired by a man or a woman, law reform is needed to ensure alignment
between the Nationality Code, Code of Persons and Family and Constitution, so there is
no room for doubt, or the discriminatory and arbitrary application of the law in the
context of contradictory provisions being open to interpretation by decision makers.
22. In addition to undermining women’s equal citizenship, gender discrimination in
nationality laws can result in wide-ranging human rights violations including obstacles
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