Scores naturalised in Lebanon where women still lack rights

beirut — A Lebanese presidential decree to naturalise hundreds of foreigners, including Iraqi Vice President Iyad Allawi and other regional elites, has ignited a row over who deserves citizenship in this tiny Mediterranean country, where one in four people is a refugee and women married to foreigners cannot pass on their citizenship to their children.

News of the decree, which was signed in secret in mid-May but leaked to the public two weeks later, has fuelled the perception that citizenship, like so many other liberties in this country, is a privilege reserved for the wealthy.

Meanwhile, Lebanese women married to foreigners don’t have the right to pass on their nationality to their children. And more than a million

Syrian and Palestinian refugees toil away in vital but back-breaking labour, without any legal protections against abuse, wage theft, arbitrary arrest and deportation.

“This decree should rattle our conscience,” said May Elian, a Lebanese woman married to a foreigner and an activist with the campaign “My Nationality is My Right

and My Family’s Right.”

But Prime Minister Saad Hariri has defended the decree, saying it is the president’s constitutional right to grant citizenship to whomever he pleases.

Customarily Lebanon’s presidents have waited until the end of their terms to issue a naturalisation decree. In this case, President Michel Aoun signed an order less than two years into his six-year term, and without disclosing it to the public, raising suspicions of malfeasance in this corruptionridden country.

Hariri and Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk, who co-signed the decree, challenged opponents to make their claims in court that some of the recipients were less than deserving.

“People who have evidence should present it,” said Interior Minister Machnouk.

As opposition to the decree gained steam, the General Security intelligence agency took the unusual step of calling on citizens to call or email with any information they had about the people set to be naturalised. —

— AP file Lebanese women married to foreigners march during a campaign to demand Lebanese mothers be allowed to pass the Lebanese citizenship to their children, in Beirut.