The Plight of the Rightless: Mapping and Understanding Statelessness in Tripoli-V1.3 and are doomed to transfer their statelessness to their newborn children. Another cause of statelessness of Syrian refugees living in Jordan is the restrictions on movement preventing parents from approaching registration offices or embassies to register the birth of their children. Additionally, family separation due to war is another factor leading to households without fathers and thus resulting in stateless children as a consequence of the patriarchal nationality law in Syria. The only exception where nationality can be transferred from the mother to her child is if the father is unknown. For cultural reasons, woman are reluctant to report that the father is unknown in such cases because the child would then be considered illegitimate, making the mother sinful in the shaming societies of Syria and Jordan. As such, in 2014, Jordan began its mission to reduce the statelessness of children of Syrian refugees born in Jordan or born in Syria but could not register and obtain documentation before fleeing to Jordan due to the crisis. Jordan’s first measure taken was making birth and marriage registration procedures more accessible through mobile civil registration offices and Shari’a courts inside refugee camps. The government introduced expedited court procedures for non-registered children above the age of one by accepting documents of informal marriages instead of official marriage certificates, and introduced two waiver periods for refugees to regularise their marriages free of charge. Shari’a courts have also been lenient by accepting photocopies of original documents and evidence by an unofficial witness of the parents’ wedding instead of a marriage certificate. Secondly, Jordan strengthened legal aid and counselling services and established an information hotline and help desks to ensure a two-way communication with communities. Moreover, Jordan engaged communities as agents of change through the distribution of awareness brochures on birth and marriage registration procedures and ensured access to good quality maternal health services for all mothers. The realised impact was a 12-fold increase in the birth certification of refugees in camps in 2016 (3,642) and 2015 (3,645) compared to 2013 (295). The risk of statelessness among Syrian refugee children was substantially reduced in Jordan as well as risks of trafficking, illegal adoption and their possible denial of basic rights to health and education.73 73 Ibid. 65

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