Activists have urged Nepal to submit a report to the United Nations on how it has fared in tackling gender discrimination, hoping it will shed light on a new citizenship policy they say penalises many women.
Nepal in 1991 signed and ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which is seen by experts as an international bill of rights for women.
As part of the CEDAW, member states must submit a progress report every four years. But the Himalayan nation has failed to send its latest report, which was due in June last year, to the Geneva-based CEDAW committee.
Activists hope to glean information from the report on a newly enacted policy that puts limits on women passing on their citizenship to their children.
“Nepali women only have a partial or conditional right to pass citizenship to their children under the new constitution. But this is not so with men,” said Sabin Shrestha, executive director of the Forum for Women, Law and Development, a non-profit group in Kathmandu.
“This contradicts Article 9 of CEDAW which calls for equal rights with respect to citizenship,” Shrestha said.
The constitution, passed in September last year, says if a Nepali woman is married to a foreign man, their children cannot have Nepali citizenship. Whereas if the father is Nepali, his children can be Nepali, regardless of the wife’s nationality.
A government official said the CEDAW report was delayed because the authorities were overstretched after major earthquakes in April and May last year.