PAKISTAN has taken a landmark step with the enactment of the Pakistan Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2026. The amendment clarifies the retroactive effect of the landmark 2000 reform to the Pakistan Citizenship Act, 1951, which first recognised the right of Pakistani women to confer nationality on their children on an equal basis with men.

In the 1951 law, citizenship by descent could only be acquired through the father. As a consequence of this, children born to Pakistani mothers married to foreign nationals or persons who were undocumented were excluded from citizenship. This gender-discriminatory framework left many children without legal recognition or documentation.

While the 2000 reform looked towards correcting this inequality by allowing Pakistani women to pass citizenship to their children, the benefits were not applied retroactively. As a result, many individuals — specifically those born before 2000 — remained undocumented, because their mothers had been denied the legal right to confer nationality at the time of their birth. This change is an important step towards addressing long-standing gaps in Pakistan’s citizenship framework through legislation. In recent years,........

© Dawn