June 28, 2019
The Guardian Council has rejected a bill allowing mothers to pass their Iranian citizenship on to their children—although the objections are not to the main point of the legislation, so the bill is likely to be modified and made law.
In a statement on its website, the 12-man council said it did not have an issue with the spirit of the bill, but rather with the absence of any clauses allowing the authorities to address “security” issues potentially arising from the activities of foreign fathers.
The statement didn’t make clear why a father’s misbehavior should have an impact on a child’s citizenship.
The council was also concerned that the bill would automatically grant residence permits to foreign fathers, when in the council’s view the government must retain the discretion to refuse, Majlis Deputy Tayebeh Siavoshi told the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA).
The bill has been seen as one of several to update laws that treat women as second-class citizens. Iranian women in Europe and North America who marry non-Iranians have not been allowed to get Iranian citizenship for their children while men who marry foreign women can do so.
But the main impact will be for Iranian women living in Iran who have married Afghan refugees. Their children are treated as aliens ineligible for the normal benefits of citizenship.
Iran is one of seven countries worldwide that do not allow mothers to confer their citizenship on their children with no or very limited exceptions, according to a 2019 report by the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR). The others are Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Somalia, Brunei and eSwatini (formerly Swaziland). Only the last is not majority Muslim.
“Thousands of children were left out in the cold…. With this law, things would have cleared up for them,” said sociologist Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour in an interview with the state news agency. “Some of them can’t have driving licenses, some of them can’t have social security benefits,” he said.