Plea to change citizenship law
By tariq khonji
Published: 11th January 2007
BAHRAINI women married to foreigners and their stateless children yesterday appealed to parliament to amend ‘biased’ nationality laws.
The women demanded their right to marry whomever they chose and not be punished, along with their children, because of it.
Bahraini Siham Abdul Hussain told a two-day pan-Arab Regional Naturalisation Conference about how difficult the laws have made it for her, her Saudi husband Ali Jawad and her two children Zainab, seven, and Hassan, three.
“My children were born here and know no country other than Bahrain and yet they are foreigners in their own country,” she said.
Plea to change citizenship law
By tariq khonji
Published: 11th January 2007
BAHRAINI women married to foreigners and their stateless children yesterday appealed to parliament to amend ‘biased’ nationality laws.
The women demanded their right to marry whomever they chose and not be punished, along with their children, because of it.
Bahraini Siham Abdul Hussain told a two-day pan-Arab Regional Naturalisation Conference about how difficult the laws have made it for her, her Saudi husband Ali Jawad and her two children Zainab, seven, and Hassan, three.
“My children were born here and know no country other than Bahrain and yet they are foreigners in their own country,” she said.
“We ask parliament to amend these laws which discriminate against women married to non-Bahrainis.”
Ms Abdul Hussain said that her husband and his siblings, who were all born in Bahrain and considered it their home, had suffered all their lives because they didn’t have Bahraini passports.
“My husband works as a cook at a restaurant and had difficulty getting the job because the priority usually goes to Bahrainis,” he said.
“He has two brothers and three sisters who all suffered in some way or another because they weren’t granted Bahraini citizenship.”
Ms Abdul Hussain said her husband’s family lived in a wooden house in Adliya on property owned by the government.
Although there have never been any attempts to remove them from the house, she said the family had no sense of stability.
“The family has been living there for years before I married into it. It’s a wooden house and we suffer a lot when it rains. It is infested with insects and rats,” she said.
“They cannot build a proper house there because they don’t own the land.”
Ms Abdul Hussain doesn’t have to renew residency permits for her children because GCC nationals are not required to have them, but she fears that her children will have the same problems her husband and in-laws faced.
The two-day conference, which opened at the Elite Suites in Sanabis yesterday, has been organised by the Bahrain Women’s Society as part of a larger Arab-wide campaign for laws granting citizenship to the children of female nationals married to foreigners.
Participants are from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Morocco, Lebanon, Algeria and Syria.
Also taking part is Hussain Abdul Aziz Al Qambar, who is the Saudi child of a Bahraini mother and a Saudi father.
He says that he was born and raised in Bahrain and going to live in Saudi Arabia isn’t an option.
He has a decent income as an export manager but says that he has suffered all his life because he isn’t officially considered Bahraini.
“I couldn’t even get a seat at Bahrain University, because there are only a limited number of seats for non-Bahrainis,” he said.
“I had to instead go to study in Kuwait at my own expense.”
Mr Al Qambar recently married Bahraini Zainab Sayed Shehab. Although the couple don’t have children yet, he fears that they could suffer a similar fate.
“I am also not eligible to join General Organisation for Social Insurance (Gosi) schemes or any other programmes Bahrainis are eligible for,” he said.
Bahrain Women’s Society president Dr Wajeeha Al Baharna said that very few countries in the Arab world granted citizenship to the children of female nationals married to foreigners.
“There is Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, all of which got the law only recently,” she said.
“Tunisia had it for a long time, but with a clause that it could only be granted with the consent of the husband, though this has recently been removed.”
Dr Al Baharna said that
this issue should be
among Bahrain’s priorities moving forward.
“These children are lost in the system and lose many valuable opportunities to contribute to society and this often leads them to go astray,” she said.
“We need a permanent solution to this problem, not temporary measures.”
© Gulf Daily News