October 30, 2020
The government has now implemented a new law that will for the first time allow the children of Iranian mothers and foreign fathers to hold Iranian citizenship.
Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri published the law June 3.
The law is of greatest import to tens of thousands of children living in Iran who are deprived of access to social and health care services because their fathers are Afghans. But it can also benefit the offspring of Iranian women in the United States and Canada who married non-Iranian men and whose children have thus far been denied Iranian citizenship.
Based on the new law, Iranian women married to non-Iranian men can apply for citizenship for their under-eighteen-year-old children. Over eighteen-year-olds may apply on their own.
According to estimates, about 150,000 Iranian women living in Iran are married to foreign citizens, mainly Afghans.
More than 500,000 children from these marriages have until now been deprived of Iranian citizenship and therefore deprived of the right to vote and have a passport or other identity documents. Without identity documents they also had no access to various public services and facilities such as education, health insurance, state subsidies and other benefits.
Civil activists in Iran have been campaigning for more than a decade for an amendment to allow citizenship for these children.
Under the new law, children with non-Iranian fathers will be granted citizenship if they do not have a criminal record and there is no “security problem” about their Iranian citizenship. This means that the Ministry of Intelligence should run background checks on applicants and endorse their eligibility.