Syria: two controversies, one question

Equality at stake

The irony is that Syrian women, supposedly equal partners in building the new state, still find themselves having to defend their most elementary rights as citizens. A Syrian man can pass his nationality to his children whether they are born inside the country or abroad. A Syrian woman does not have the same right, except in a limited number of circumstances prescribed by law. 

At stake is the principle of equality before the law, enshrined in the Constitutional Declaration and reaffirmed on several occasions by Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa. If the new state is serious about breaking with the legacy of authoritarianism and discrimination, preserving this legislative inequality, or making its reform contingent upon political and security calculations, goes against the very foundations of any credible project to establish a state based on equal citizenship.

More alarming still is the nature of the campaign against the proposal. Rather than examining the proposed legislation, some opponents have portrayed it as a threat to the country's demographic composition or an attempt to grant citizenship to the children of foreign fighters. The legal and security dimensions of such concerns deserve examination. They cannot, however, justify collective accusations or serve as a pretext for denying thousands of children a legal right because of their fathers' nationality or actions.

If a father has committed a crime, the law provides the means to hold him accountable. A child does not inherit criminal responsibility for a father's actions and should never become the lifelong victim of an identity they had no say in choosing. The state is entitled to establish clear procedures for verifying documents, marriages and applications. It has no right to turn exceptional cases into a general rule or invoke security fears to perpetuate discrimination between male and female citizens.

Intersecting issues

This is precisely where the nationality question intersects with the controversy over school curricula. The former concerns whether a woman has an equal right to pass her nationality to her children. The latter concerns how women should be portrayed in textbooks, and whether their presence, participation and standing in society are accepted as natural and unquestionable, or treated as matters that can be erased or altered according to a particular ideological vision.

Among the gravest dangers facing Syria after decades of authoritarian rule is the possibility that, having failed to build new institutions, it might replace one system of exclusion with another. The language may change while the underlying mentality survives: deciding who may speak, make decisions, and have full rights.

The question confronting those in power today is whether they have the political courage to defend a state founded on equal rights, even when those rights run counter to prevailing attitudes.