The Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights (GCENR) was established in 2014 through a collaboration including several non-governmental organizations. Its mission is to mobilize action to achieve gender equality in all nationality laws, including legal reforms in the 24 countries with nationality laws that prevent women from conferring nationality on their children on an equal basis with men, including three countries that also deny men the right to confer nationality on their children born outside of legal marriage; and reform in the just under 50 countries with gender-discriminatory provisions in their nationality laws, including those that deny women’s equal right to confer nationality on non-national spouse.
Today, GCENR’s coalition includes local, regional, and international non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and independent activists across the globe, as well as United Nations partner agencies. The campaign works to raise awareness about the impact of gender discrimination in nationality laws, conducts advocacy for gender-equal nationality rights at the national, regional, and international levels, and supports related activities and research in countries where this discrimination persists.
Campaign Steering Committee members include Equality Now, Equal Rights Trust, Family Frontiers, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Nationality For All, Women’s Learning Partnership, and the Women’s Refugee Commission, which houses the Campaign and Campaign Manager.
GCENR raises awareness of the need to ensure gender-equal nationality rights and the high societal cost of gender discrimination in nationality laws, including the impact on affected individuals, their families, and society as a whole. It collaborates with international and local civil society organizations to support concrete steps to reform gender-discriminatory laws, including the ability to confer nationality on children and non-citizen spouses, and the right to acquire, change, and retain one’s nationality.
GCENR has played a significant role in supporting nationality law reforms that removed gender-discriminatory provisions and promoting gender equality, including through partnerships with local organizations in many countries. Recent reforms include Madagascar in 2017, Sierra Leone in 2017, and Liberia in 2022.
Among the activities and achievements of GCENR in the Middle East and North Africa region:
- GCENR co-organized with Bahrain Women Union the 2016 Gulf Regional Conference on Citizenship Laws: The Right of Women to Confer Nationality to Their Children (Bahrain).
- GCENR co-organized the First Arab League conference on women’s nationality rights, in partnership with the League of Arab States, the UN Refugee Agency, UNICEF, and UN Women in 2017. (Outcome statement [Arabic / English] / Civil Society Statement )
- GCENR supported and participated in the Arab League-UNHCR Ministerial Conference that introduced the Arab Declaration on Belonging and Legal Identity in 2018. (Overview of the Ministerial meeting in this article.)
- GCENR supported and participated in Arab League-UNHCR Ministerial Conference (May 2021, online).
- GCENR co-organized with Collective For Research and Development-Action a MENA Regional civil society workshop in Beirut in 2019. (Arabic version of a report on good practices in the MENA region launched on the sidelines.)
- GCENR held a MENA regional civil society workshop (online) in March 2022.
- GCENR organized the Arab States Multi Stakeholder Conference on Achieving Gender-Equal Nationality Laws, in partnership with UNICEF and UNHCR, which brought together more than sixty officials, representatives of civil society, and other actors from 17 Arab countries.
- GCENR implemented and supported training workshops for youth activists in several MENA countries in collaboration with local campaigns and supported projects led by youth activists demanding an end to gender discrimination in their countries’ nationality laws, which mobilized other youth to join national campaigns for gender-equal nationality rights.
