CEDAW Article 9: Requires states to give women equal rights to acquire, change, or retain their nationality, and to pass it to their children
Article 9 asks whose citizenship counts. A state can guarantee women the vote, a seat in parliament, and a place in its foreign service, and still decide that a woman cannot be the origin of her own child's nationality. Nationality is the right to have rights, and Article 9 exists because many states decided, in law, that it flows through men.
What it states
Article 9 has two clauses.
Article 9(1): States must grant women equal rights with men to acquire, change, or retain their nationality. In particular, neither marriage to a foreigner nor a husband's change of nationality during marriage may automatically change the wife's nationality, render her stateless, or force the husband's nationality upon her.
Article 9(2): States must grant women equal rights with men with respect to the nationality of their children.
The first clause protects the woman's own status. It was written against nationality laws under which a woman who married a foreigner lost her citizenship, or took her husband's whether she wanted it or not. The second clause is where the fight has actually been. A woman can keep her own citizenship under 9(1) and still be unable to pass it on, which leaves her children dependent on a father's nationality, or on none at all if the father is foreign, stateless, or absent.
Vehicle for new protections
The Committee has treated Article 9 as foundational to everything else. General Recommendation 21 (1994) describes nationality as critical to full participation in society. General Recommendation 32 (2014) extends this to the gender dimensions of refugee status, asylum, nationality, and statelessness. In it the Committee says that failing to meet Article 9(2) places children at risk of statelessness. It also says that reservations to Article 9 undermine the object and purpose of the Convention, and it notes with interest a trend toward withdrawing or narrowing them.
Statelessness is what the equality principle turns into in practice. A child without a nationality may be unable to register a birth, attend school, access health care, or later hold a job, own property, or marry. The mother's equal right to confer citizenship is therefore a protection for the child as much as for her.
Reservations
Article 9 is one of the most reserved provisions in the Convention, and the reservations concentrate on 9(2). Several are unusually candid about what they protect.
Cyprus entered a reservation on 9(2) that stated it would be withdrawn upon amendment of the relevant law, which is a reservation drafted with its own expiry.
Malaysia announced in December 2020 that it would keep its reservation to 9(2), in answer to a question about Malaysian mothers who cannot automatically confer citizenship on children born abroad to foreign spouses.
Jordan and Lebanon still maintain reservations to 9(2).
Syria maintains a reservation to 9(2) on the grant of a woman's nationality to her children.
Tunisia was criticized by the Committee in 2010 for its reservation to 9(2), among others.
Article 9 is heavily reserved, and the reservations are the most honest thing about it. The state says out loud that it intends to keep nationality running through the father. A reservation that is written down is at least a reservation a Committee can point to and a campaign can target.