Advocacy Campaigns

WLP’s advocacy strategy is to engage in multi-year, research-intensive, grassroots-driven advocacy campaigns. Our current campaigns include:

Take Action Survey #2 to determine how nationality laws affect children's education.

Claiming Equal Citizenship: The Campaign for Arab Women’s Right to Nationality supports a six-country regional campaign to raise awareness of discriminatory laws that deny women equal nationality rights and undermine women’s status as equal citizens in their home countries. The campaign calls for legal reform allowing women to confer their nationality to their husbands and children, full implementation of reformed laws, and recognition of women as equal citizens.

Read how the Iranian Parliament is attempting to push back family legislation by 42 years.

One Million Signatures: The campaign aims to collect one million signatures to demand an end to discriminatory laws against women in Iran. At present, men have the sole right to divorce and, except in special cases, the right to custody of children. One man’s testimony equals that of two women. A daughter receives half a son’s inheritance. The campaign is a continuation of Iranian women’s century-long struggle for gender equality.

To see the state of family law in Muslim-majority countries, click here.

Family Law Reform Campaign: Moroccan women’s rights activists achieved their goal in January 2004 when the government of Morocco adopted a new landmark Family Law supporting women’s equality and granting women new rights in marriage and divorce, among others. The Family Law Reform Campaign continues in other Muslim-majority countries.

Equality Without Reservation: Eliminating Discrimination against Women in the Arab Region - Appeal to all Arab Governments for the Withdrawal of Reservations and the Ratification of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW.

Family Law Reform Campaign in Morocco and Beyond

Successful law reform campaign launched in Morocco takes on international presence

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Interview with Lina Abou-Habib, Director of CRTD-A, on Women's Right to Nationality

Lina Abou-Habib

Interview with Lina Abou-Habib, Director of Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action (CRTD-A), March 4, 2006

By Anna Workman, Program Associate, WLP

Why is the right to nationality an important issue for women in the Middle East and North Africa?

Essentially because nationality is a case in point of how citizenship in this region is gendered.

Law does not recognize children of Lebanese females

CRTD-A calls for right of all Lebanese to pass on nationality

By Meris Lutz
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
Wednesday, March 08, 2006

International women's day

BEIRUT: "Hi, I'm Rana. This is my daughter - she's Norwegian," the young woman said, gently bouncing the baby on her lap as she passed out fliers reading "My nationality: a right for me and my family" at AUB on Tuesday.

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Interview with Wajeeha Al Baharna, President of Bahrain Women's Society, on the Nationality Campaign in Bahrain

Wajeeha Al BaharnaInterview with Wajeeha Al Baharna, President of the Bahrain Women's Society, March 7, 2006

By Anna Workman, Program Associate, WLP

Claiming Equal Citizenship: The Campaign for Arab Women’s Right to Nationality

University students in Lebanon support campaignIn 2006, WLP will stand in solidarity with partners in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Gulf regions to call for women's equal citizenship rights, including equal rights to confer nationality to their spouses and children. In the majority of MENA and Gulf countries, only men have the legal right to confer nationality to non-national spouses and children.

"Nationality is a case in point of how citizenship in this region is gendered...whether or not you are a national will determine very much whether you're have the right to representation, whether you have the right to social entitlements, whether you're a full citizen or not. So when the laws in most countries in the MENA and Gulf regions say that a citizen is someone born of a father of that country only, this clearly says that the state considers that only men are real citizens," said Lina Abou-Habib, Director of WLP's Lebanese partner Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action (CRTD-A), one of the organizations leading the regional campaign for Arab women's right to nationality.

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