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Iraq: New constitution prevents
citizenship for Jews, says MP
27.7.2005
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Baghdad, 27 July
(AKI) - The first draft of the new Iraqi
constitution will prevent Iraqi Jews, stripped of
their nationality in the 1940s and 1950s, from
re-obtaining it, Mundhir al-Fadl, an Iraqi MP and
member of the constituent assembly's constitution
commisssion, has told Adnkronos International (AKI).
Al-Fadl, one of the commision members responsible
for drafting the constitution's chapter on "rights
and duties" explained that one paragraph of the
draft says that "the Iraqi nationality is a right
acquired by every Iraqi, which cannot be withheld
for any reason and is the basis of his citizenship."
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Photo: AKI |
"All those who have been deprived of their
citizenship after 8 February 1963 have the right to
recover it, as they have the right to multiple
nationality," the draft continues.
However, the parliamentarian, who is part of the
Kurdish list, pointed out that this rules out Iraq's
Jews, who were forced to emigrate from the country
before 8 February 1963, the date of the coup carried
out by the Baath party, who overthrew the country's
then ruler, Brig Abd-al-Karim Qasim, who had taken
power in a military coup almost five years earlier.
"I believe that every Iraqi citizen deprived of
their nationality for any reason, political, ethnic
or religious, has the right to recover it," al-Fadl
told AKI. He added that "this opinion represents the
majority, but not all the members [of the
constituent assembly], it is contrary to the
universal declaration of the rights of man and
implies a clear discrimination against men on the
basis of their religion," he said, affirming that
"the aim of this text is clearly to prevent Iraqi
Jews from recovering their Iraqi nationality."
During the 1940s and 50s the Iraqi government took
away Iraqi citizenship from many Iraqi Jews,
confiscating their property and capital, despite
which the majority refused to leave the country they
were born in and had lived in for many years in
peace and harmony together with other religions.
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