HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL Forum on Minority Issues Geneva, 28-30 November 11 Madame Chair, I thank you for this opportunity. My name is Fawzi Dilber. I represent, along with my colleagues Ms. Mona Mustafa and Mr. Mohammad Husnayani, the Kurdish Centre for Legal Studies & Consultancy (YASA e.V.). Our organization works in defending Kurdish rights in Syria, through local, regional and international legal means in cooperation with governmental organizations and NGOs that are concerned with Kurdish minority rights in the Middle East and defending them. In spite of Syria becoming one of the signatory states on the 28th of March 2003 to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination, the plight of Kurdish women has still not changed, which they have been living through since the Baath Party came into power in Syria in 1963. Syria has placed reservations on Clause 2, Paragraph 2 of Clause 9, Paragraph 4 of Clause 15 and Paragraphs 1 and 2 of Clause 16, which concern Kurdish women more than their Arab companions, where all the customary, emergency, and political laws reflect the lack of development in the Kurdish regions. They are being barred from naturalizing their children if they "marry in secret", and these cases are familiar in the island region, whereby the nationalities of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish citizens have been withdrawn, in an exceptional "racist census" in 1961, or from non-Syrians but under the weight of the contemporary revolutionary situation. Thus nationalities were granted to denaturalized Kurds, but no procedures are being undertaken, nor is there any intention of compensating them for their plight, which they have been suffering from for approximately the past four and a half decades. In light of the Personal Status Law, which is considered to be "male-oriented", its contents are "blatantly" discriminatory when it comes to custodianship, guardianship, testimony and equality rights in marriage, divorce, and inheritance, in addition to the fact that a woman's inheritance right is half of a man's. This is obtained, noting that she is often denied her right of inheritance. Even the Penal Code does not give women justice in what it calls honour crimes and adultery, where lighter punishments are issued for men who commit similar crimes, noting that there are laws and constitutional rights protecting women with lower limits, except that the executive authorities discard the law's contents and follow the prevailing customs, thereby causing Kurdish and Yazidi women to suffer more and more. Here there is a large percentage of Kurds from the Yazidi religion who are forced to implement Islamic Shariah law despite not belonging to it. As for the political participation of Kurdish women, it is worth noting that the Syrian constitution does not recognize the existence of Kurdish minorities. Kurdish women suffer the same hardships as men in relation to the government's position, which prevents the establishment or organization of any foundation or group for Kurdish women. Instead of encouraging them to actively participate in political life, we see them, for political reasons, being completely deprived of many of the advantages enjoyed by their fellow female Arab compatriots, beginning with studying their mother tongue through the non-acceptance of the state and its institutional forms, and ending with