Constitutional Records Study and Determination Committee of the Constituent Assembly has determined citizenship issues as settled.
As per what has been called a settled issue, citizenship by descent will be granted to the applicant if his/her mother and father were Nepali citizens at the time of the birth of the applicant.
Presenting a paper on ‘New Constitution and Problems of Citizenship’ at a programme organised by UNDP’s Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal, Advocate Dipendra Jha said CA members needed to reopen the debate on citizenship.
He said Nepali men and women getting married to foreigners should be treated equally while granting them marital naturalised citizenship. Parties have agreed in the CA to grant naturalised citizenship to foreign men married to Nepali women only after residing in Nepal for 15 years.
Jha said incorporating the agreed provisions of citizenship in the new constitution would be a regressive step.
He quoted Forum for Women, Law and Development’s 2013 survey report which said the number of people without citizenship in the country was 4,346,000 (23.65 per cent of the total population). Jha said the new constitution should also grant citizenship by virtue of birth to those who missed the deadline when the provision was incorporated in the Interim Constitution.
FWLD Executive Director Sabin Shrestha said patriarchy and the lust for monopolising state power were the main reasons behind unfair citizenship provisions.
“Our citizenship laws have ethnic, gender and regional biases,” he said.
Among the communities, he added, Muslims are the worst affected with citizenship holding population remaining bellow 70 per cent. He said if the nationality of both parents was made the prerequisite for obtaining citizenship by descent, almost a million children who have single parent (almost 900,000 living with single mother) will be at the risk of being stateless.
Shrestha said although communists’ ideology is to talk of borderless society, Nepali communists are unnecessarily rigid on nationality issue.
“Nepal Workers and Peasants’ Party has proposed in the CA that if a Nepali citizen by descent gets married to a foreign national, his/her citizenship should be downgraded to naturalised status. How can this be fair?” Shrestha added.
Nepal’s former ambassador Vijay Kant Karna said Nepal’s citizenship laws were discriminatory against Madhesis and state’s bias against Madhesis was at the root of it. He said if the agreed provisions of citizenship in the CA were not rephrased, they could be more regressive than the provisions of the Interim Constitution.
CPN-UML CA member Kamala Subedi said problems of citizenship are acute in both regions — Hills and Madhes.
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