While the Syrian government has been increasingly re-integrated into the regional and international fold, over one million children living in the last rebel-held stronghold in northwest Syria have become even more isolated. After 12 years of ongoing war and displacement and one year since the February 2023 earthquake, they face an ever-dire humanitarian situation; among them, hundreds of thousands of undocumented children are at risk of statelessness. To date, there has been little focus on their plight, with limited humanitarian and media access to the area.
In one case, highlighted in a recent report by the Fletcher School of Global Affairs International Law Practicum (FILP) in partnership with Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Raghda*, a mother living in impoverished conditions in northwest Syria, was not able to secure birth registration documents for five of her children. Consequently, Raghda’s children had limited to no access to humanitarian aid and healthcare, were neither able to register in school, nor move from northwest Syria, even for purposes of returning home to their community of origin.
Perhaps no issue underscores children living in northwest Syria’s precarious existence more than the deprivation of their rights to nationality and legal identity, rights that are fundamental for all children’s lives as well as any political solution to the conflict. The FILP-NRC report finds that without addressing the core barriers to realizing children’s rights to nationality and legal identity—namely by facilitating access to internationally recognized birth certificates and eliminating Syria’s gender discriminatory nationality laws—these children will remain living on the margins, vulnerable to becoming a new generation of stateless in the region.
Risks of functional to legal statelessness
Currently, children living in areas of northwest Syria controlled by the armed group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have no viable access to any official and recognized legal documentation certifying their births or basic existence. The identity documentation issued by the HTS-associated de facto authorities are recognized neither by the Syrian government nor any other government, and for most families in northwest Syria access to Syrian government birth documentation is nearly impossible. Lack of documentation establishing children’s legal identity puts their claims to Syrian nationality at risk, and results in children experiencing a cascade of deprivations of their basic rights.
To be legally stateless means to be “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.” Being deprived of the fundamental right to a nationality, stateless persons are uniquely at risk of a broad range of human rights violations which affects them throughout the course of their lives. For this reason, the right to nationality is deemed essential, and sometimes described as the basis for “the right to have rights.”
Thousands of children in northwest Syria are denied their right to a nationality based solely on Syria’s gender-discriminatory nationality law and practices
Syria’s Nationality Law grants citizenship on the basis of paternal descent, not maternal descent, except in limited circumstances which are rarely implemented. Children in HTS-controlled northwest Syria are largely not legally stateless as most are entitled to Syrian nationality under Syria’s Nationality Law based on their fathers’ Syrian nationality. However, the numerous barriers impeding children’s ability to document their identity or their nationality has made children in northwest Syria vulnerable to being “functionally stateless,” experiencing similar rights deprivations and harms as stateless individuals. Moreover, in the context of war and displacement, lack of recognized documentation of a child’s identity can result in children moving from being at risk of statelessness to being legally stateless.
Thousands of children in northwest Syria are denied their right to a nationality based solely on Syria’s gender-discriminatory nationality law and practices, which prevents Syrian women from passing on citizenship to their children. Due to the conflict, Syria’s gender discriminatory nationality law not only implicates children who are born to foreign and stateless fathers, but also can present barriers for the thousands of children whose fathers have died, disappeared, are absent, are fearful of cooperating in the civil registration process in Syrian government-controlled areas, or lack the means to prove their nationality (let alone their marriage). Consequently, where there are particular challenges in registering children’s births or in documenting descent to a Syrian father, these children are at heightened risk of statelessness.
A crisis within a crisis
Raghda and her children’s circumstances are not unique, especially in northwest Syria where over half the population has been internally displaced. Throughout the Syrian conflict, northwest Syria became a refuge as well as a site of migration, with Idlib being the refuge of last resort for Syrians fleeing Syrian government forces. The Idlib governorate was among the first to join the 2011 uprising against the Assad regime and has been referred to as a stronghold of so-called Islamist militants among other opposition groups. By 2019, HTS became the dominant non-state armed group in the area and established in 2017 the Salvation Syrian Government (SSG) as its administrative entity.
While major hostilities have settled into pseudo-stalemates in other parts of Syria, there are still military conflicts in northwest Syria with civilians being the biggest victims of this violence. The area has seen the most intense military escalation in years, which displaced 120,000 civilians. After years of war and marginalization, compounded by an economic crisis, sanctions, and a devastating earthquake in February 2023, the population of northwest Syria has endured “a crisis within a crisis.” The manifold disruptions to daily life and security, aside from the ongoing conflict, complicate and exacerbate need. Today, the region’s families are unable to meet their health, food, education, and security needs, with 90 percent living in poverty and struggling to feed themselves. With a collapsed civilian infrastructure, humanitarian NGOs generally provide assistance in the form of food, disability aid, psycho-social support, and shelter, but humanitarian access to northwest Syria remains tenuous at best. Meanwhile, the SSG acts as the local de facto authorities operating governmental functions for several million people; this includes a legislative body and 10 ministries performing roles that were previously performed by the Syrian government.
Serious risks to possessing SSG documents
Like other de facto authorities in the area, the SSG has increasingly made it a priority to administer and issue civil documentation for those living in HTS-controlled areas. The SSG civil registry practices are largely similar to the Syrian government: they use the same registry, the same templates, and are even staffed by some of the same professional personnel, though the documentation issued has different logos and stamps and they no longer share information with the Syrian government-affiliated civil registries.
But parents in northwest Syria are often highly wary of obtaining SSG documentation and prefer Syrian government documents. This is due to the complete lack of recognition of SSG identity documentation by the Syrian government and internationally, but also due to the liability of potential recrimination for those caught with SSG documentation by Syrian government forces, other governments, and/or rebel groups. HTS is subject to UN sanctions and is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, Russia, and Turkey. Being in possession of SSG documentation is largely perceived by the Syrian government as evidence of treason and/or affiliation with the opposition. Still, given the insurmountable barriers to accessing Syrian government identity documents, people in northwest Syria often have no choice but to secure documentation from other authorities—as is the case with Raghda’s children. Moreover, since December 2022, SSG has increasingly made its own documentation a prerequisite to families’ access to salaries, school exams, and car ownership transfers.
Given the insurmountable barriers to accessing Syrian government identity documents, people in northwest Syria often have no choice but to secure documentation from other authorities
Among the most significant barriers to accessing Syrian government civil documentation are families’ security concerns at checkpoints and traveling to government areas. Security risks include arbitrary detention, paying bribes to be released after detention, being forcefully conscripted into the Syrian army, torture and other ill-treatment, sexual assault, enforced disappearance, and death while in custody. Even for those who would attempt to travel to Syrian government areas, nearly all crossings between non-government and government areas in the northwest have in general remained closed since March 2020.
Beyond security risks, there are numerous onerous administrative and practical barriers which stand in the way of children being registered with the Syrian government and even with the de facto authorities. Before registering a child’s birth, parents must have the needed underlying documentation which may have been lost or destroyed, or the parents may never have had, including a civil registration of their marriage. The necessity to register parents’ marriages before birth registration adds to the complexities, particularly in instances of unregistered religious marriages or when the father is absent. Another major obstacle are the civil registration costs: Families are unable to pay for the associated fees, late fines, transportation and legal assistance costs, or costs to hire intermediaries. Indeed, Raghda herself could not access birth registration documents even from the local de facto authorities, in part because she could not afford the associated costs for the retroactive registration process of her religious marriage.
Despite high reported rates of birth registration in Syria prior to the conflict, today, it is likely that more than a quarter of children in northwest Syria do not have recognized birth registration documents, national identity cards, or passports, and they are not identified in family registers. Most children in northwest Syria born after 2017 are not registered with the Syrian government. While in 2021 the Syrian government issued a new Civil Status Law which included a few welcome changes, there remained numerous barriers for children in northwest Syria to overcome their ‘undocumented nationality’ and the consequent ‘functional statelessness.’
Living on the margins
Although the Syrian government does not have effective control in northwest Syria, the international human rights treaties to which the government is a party are applied throughout Syria, including in HTS/SSG northwest Syria. Consequently, the human rights obligations enshrined in various treaties, including the right to nationality and legal identity, guaranteed in the Arab Charter on Human Rights and numerous international human rights treaties, persist in the context of northwest Syria, irrespective of the area being under the effective control of de facto authorities. HTS/SSG also must protect the human rights of individuals and groups in the area due to HTS’s control of territory and the SSG’s performance of governmental functions. This includes the obligation to protect international standards of rights related to accessing civil documentation.
Given the humanitarian situation in northwest Syria, obtaining birth registration documents and other identity documents may not initially be perceived as a high priority. Yet for children and their families living in the area—many of whom have experienced crippling effects of being undocumented—the issue is fundamental and persists as a primary protection risk. As seen in Raghda and her children’s struggle, birth registration and legal identity documents are a practical necessity and precondition for accessing other rights and services: the most obvious being for her children to legally establish Raghda as their mother, or to access the even limited healthcare that exists in the region, travel, as well as other basic rights in the longer term, including their rights to buy, sell, and inherit property, marry, and work.
Birth registration and legal identity documents are a practical necessity and precondition for accessing other rights and services
As Raghda did not have the financial resources necessary to register her marriage, she was unable to register her children’s birth. Like many in northwest Syria, Raghda’s children were unable to enroll in school without birth documentation, and one child ended up working in exploitative child labor conditions while Raghda had to marry off her eldest daughter at the age of 15. When Raghda eventually secured documentation from the regional authorities thanks to the assistance of NGOs, she was able to register some of her children in school and reduced their working hours. While these efforts had a significant positive impact on preserving Raghda and her children’s legal status, they are only a half-measure. Her children still cannot leave the area, and having SSG documentation presents major security risks should they leave the area.
For children in northwest Syria with or without this documentation, there are no clear options to go about their daily life or plan for their future. With such limited prospects, one key person interviewed on the ground described the situation for youth in northwest Syria as akin to “living in a prison.” He said that he understood why some sought to be smuggled to Europe, noting that “they have no ID recognized by anyone in the world.”
Ways forward: Children in northwest Syria’s “right to have rights”
A systematic and concerted approach by the Syrian government, UN, and other stakeholders is needed to address the children in northwest Syria’s rights to legal nationality and identity. This approach should focus on two central concerns: facilitating children’s access to recognized civil registration documents and reforming Syria’s gender discriminatory nationality law and practices.
First, the Syrian government can simplify the birth registration process by taking into account the difficulties faced by families during the war, particularly those who live or have lived in areas such as northwest Syria with less access to official documentation. This includes waiving associated fees and any late fines for registration, and removing the marriage registration requirement to register births, which currently acts as a major barrier for parents. Although this is disputed and there are social taboos at the idea of removing the marriage registration requirement, given the exceptional circumstances of war and displacement, this might help address this administrative barrier. Potentially even more significant, authorities should ensure that possession of identity documents issued by the local authorities in northwest Syria is not interpreted as affiliation or endorsement of that non-state armed group and authorities—instead such documentation should be used as sufficient evidence of the occurrence of vital events (birth, marriage, death, etc.). This would not only allow children in northwest Syria to access basic benefits such as going to school in the short-term, but it would also facilitate their access to recognized documentation of these vital events in the future.
Second, reforming Syria’s gender discriminatory nationality law and practices can have a profound impact on addressing the lack of access to nationality rights for children in northwest Syria, whether they be children with foreign or stateless fathers, or children with Syrian fathers. Syrian civil rights groups have long called for the Syrian government to join other MENA countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco to allow mothers to confer their nationality to their children. Both on the basis of children’s rights and gender equality, such a reform is long overdue; and after 12 years of war, it is a practical necessity.
Children in northwest Syria are experiencing profound violations of their most basic rights, promised to them at birth yet arbitrarily withheld. Without addressing the core barriers to accessing their rights to nationality and legal identity, these children and the adults they become will remain vulnerable to the harms associated with exclusion and statelessness.
* Name has been changed to protect the individual’s privacy. An NGO collected from the field a number of case studies of individual women with undocumented children to gain a deeper understanding of access to nationality and legal identity issues and their impacts, particularly on women and their children in northwest Syria. Read the full report here.
Alex Chon-Kang is pursuing a masters of international affairs, and Vidya Kakra is pursuing an LLM in international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; both were members of the Fletcher International Law Practicum. Christine Bustany is a senior lecturer in international law and directs the Fletcher International Law Practicum at the Fletcher School.