GNV News 2025/7/18

2025/7/15, that gender discrimination in nationality laws remains in more than 45 countries was announced by an international human rights organization. In these countries, women do not have the same rights as men to acquire, retain, or change their own nationality, or to confer nationality on a foreign spouse. In addition, in 24 countries, women do not have the same right as men to pass their nationality to their children.

When women and their children who do not hold the nationality of their country of residence depend on a male spouse’s citizenship, they may be unable to leave the relationship even if the spouse is abusive, making it difficult to escape domestic violence. Moreover, the harms of gender-discriminatory nationality laws are not borne by individual women alone. In cases where the father does not have the country’s nationality and children living in the mother’s home country cannot obtain nationality, access to public education, public healthcare, and social welfare services, as well as work permits and opening bank accounts, is restricted, and it also becomes difficult to join professional associations required for employment in licensed professions.

Furthermore, children who become stateless in this way, especially girls, are more likely to be placed in informal work environments, and without written employment contracts they become even more vulnerable to exploitation by employers, including sexual harassment and sexual assault. In some families, early or forced marriage is chosen as a means to secure a child’s citizenship, resulting in human trafficking and child marriage. In addition, when women cannot grant citizenship to foreign husbands, those husbands find it difficult to obtain lawful residency status and employment opportunities locally, leading to family separation and instability in their livelihoods.

Building on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Beijing Platform for Action—the most comprehensive and highest-level international framework on women’s human rights and empowerment—many countries are advancing respect for women’s human rights and reviewing their legal systems. Even in countries where discrimination against women remains in nationality laws, urgent reforms toward gender-equal nationality laws that use inclusive terms such as citizen, parent, and spouse are needed.

Learn more about international coverage of discrimination against women in Japan → “International reporting on discrimination against women“

Learn more about the world’s stance toward gender equality → “Gender inequality and the world“

One of the countries that does not allow mothers to confer nationality on their children. Passport of the Republic of Iraq (Photo: Kushared / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0])