Mohammed Noor Baksh, a 60-year-old Pakistani driver, has been married to a Saudi woman for 27 years and hasn’t traveled outside the Kingdom for the past 15 years. He has two daughters — one 21-year-old and the other 19-year-old — and a 14-year-old son. When he tried getting his children Saudi nationality, he hit a snag.Baksh’s son wasn’t the problem: When he turns 18 he can apply for citizenship with a strong likelihood of eventually being granted citizenship as the male offspring of a Saudi woman. The girls, however, are barred from the same process, jeopardizing their access to social benefits accorded to Saudi citizens. To get citizenship, Baksh was told they would need to marry Saudis. “I applied to the Department of Civil Affairs in Makkah and Jeddah to obtain for my children and myself Saudi citizenship, but my attempts failed,” he said. “They told me that my daughters could get citizenship only if they marry Saudi men and because I don’t have a degree I can’t become Saudi.”
Recently the Shoura Council approved legislation granting citizenship to foreign-born women married to Saudi men, as well as widows of deceased Saudis. The law does not include Saudi women married to foreigners, so the hurdles for Saudi women obtaining citizenship for the children of their foreign husbands continue.