TEHRAN, Iran — In Iran, lawmakers have acted to vote against a bill that would grant citizenship to the children of Iranian mothers and non-Iranian fathers. This dampens the hopes of hundreds of thousands of people who have been deprived of their social rights because their fathers are not Iranian.

The citizenship bill, put forward by 49 signatories, was first presented to parliament’s presiding board. At an open session Sept. 20, its double urgency was approved, with 140 votes in favor and 36 against. The double urgency designation meant that it had to be put to a final vote in less than a week. The most important part of the 12-article bill was its first article, which states: “The children of marriages between Iranian women and foreign men, or men who have no nationality but have been/will be born in Iran, may be granted citizenship after reaching the age of 18 if they have resided in Iran for five consecutive years prior to making their citizenship request.”

Between 400,000 and 1 million people in Iran are estimated to lack Iranian nationality despite having an Iranian mother. The majority of these individuals were born out of so-called “temporary marriages,” known as mut’ah in Arabic and sigheh in Persian, between Iranian women and Afghan men. These men took refuge in Iran either after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, or following the Afghan civil war in the 1990s or the US-led invasion in 2001.

Mehrangiz Kar, a prominent Iranian lawyer and women’s and children’s rights activist who has faced arrest and imprisonment for her activities, told Al-Monitor: “These children and youths are deprived of educational and health facilities as well as other services that Iranian citizens benefit from, such as subsidies and the like. In a word, they have no civil rights and lack identity documents or a birth certificate.”