Proliferation of Statelessness and Gender Discriminatory Nationality Laws

Women have been deprived of equality in acquiring, changing or passing their nationality to their partner or children from times immemorial. It has always been considered that women’s right to nationality has to be read in consonance to their male counterparts like father by the time the girl is not married and thereafter her husband. A women’s existence has been viewed as flowing from her relationship with the relevant man in her life. The situation of women gets bleaker than men with reference to becoming stateless as they could even be stateless at birth as well as they can become stateless at marriage, which is not the case of men. Statelessness can happen both in countries where citizenship can be attained by jus soli as well as by jus sanguinis. Depriving women of the right to pass her nationality does not simply result into criticality of losing right to nationality by her children, rather it has far-fetched consequences as well like affecting the social, cultural, civil, political and economic rights of the child. If the right to nationality is restrained from any person due to any reason whatsoever, it becomes one of the leading causes of risk of statelessness. Similarly, gender discriminatory nationality laws lead to childhood statelessness. A woman is not the only victim of discriminatory nationality laws; however the geopolitical scenario is also not remained untouched of its massive turmoil. If the international framework could have been simpler and straightforward a women could be saved of statelessness, when she marries a man who has citizenship, consequently their children would also be protected from the risk of future statelessness. However, the situation gets grim due to conflicting nationality laws between different nations.