More women, fewer rights? Iraq’s parliament debates child marriage despite historic female representation
There have never been more women in Iraq’s parliament, so why might it be about to open the door to child marriage?
In Iraq and across the world, activists have been speaking up about proposals that could reduce the legal marriage age from 18 to just 9 years old. The debate in the Iraqi parliament has sparked outrage from local women’s groups, who have joined together as part of the 188 Alliance - named for the number designation for Iraq’s ‘personal status law’, the legislation that covers areas of family law and subject of the proposed amendments.
Your rights as a spouse and as a parent are some of the most fundamental and significant ways in which most people interact with the law. As such they have always been one of the main battlegrounds for women’s activism. Arguably, rights in the family have been as important and motivating for gender equality movements as rights in the workplace have been for labor movements.
Personal status laws in the Arab region are often based on religious jurisprudence and practice, enshrining traditions and practices onto the statute book. This means that women face significant discrimination and unequal treatment, with harmful practices enshrined in law - polygamy, for example, remains legal for men in many countries in the region, while many inheritance laws mean that women are entitled to a fraction of the legacies their male relatives might receive.
Frequently, women in the region are not only unequal within the family, but they can often expect different treatment before the law compared to their neighbours. In Lebanon, for example, there are 15 different personal status laws, one for each religious group and sect. The vagaries of history and geography also play a part in how the law treats this area. For Palestinians living in the West Bank, the Jordanian personal status law of 1976 is applied, while in Gaza, the equivalent Egyptian law of 1954 is in force.
With these complications in mind, modernising such laws has been a fundamental but vast challenge for women across the region. And so far, it has yielded progress that may have been slow but whose impact has been huge for the lives of women and families affected.
Following long-running campaigns led by tireless activists, Morocco updated its personal status law - the Moudawana - in 2004. The revision ended discrimination such as the requirement for women to have their marriages approved by a ‘guardian’, as well as granting women the right to file for divorce, and increasing the legal marriage age from 15 to 18. The law however remains a focus for women’s activism in Morocco, where they are lobbying parliament as it considers further amendment to the Moudawana. Priorities include removing the discretionary power of judges to authorise marriages of girls younger than 18, and the abolition of articles that mean divorced mothers relinquish custody rights if they remarry.
Personal status laws have then been something of a touchstone for women’s rights in our region. The debates in the Iraqi parliament, however, show that the movement in changing these laws is not always forward, and that the hard-won progress we have is not only at risk of stalling but of being reversed.
If the news stories of Iraq’s legal marriage age being drastically reduced seems at all familiar, it is because this is not the first time that conservative elements have tried to enact such a law. Similar attempts were made in 2014 and 2017 before outcry put a stop to the legislation. So what has changed?
When the most recent attempt to amend the personal status law in this way failed, a quarter of legislators in the Iraqi parliament were women - the minimum proportion required under the country’s constitution. In the subsequent election, women were even more electorally successful, to the extent that women candidates outperformed the constitutional quota. Such a result might ordinarily be a cause for celebration among women’s rights activists—after all, increasing women’s political representation has been a common call for our movement globally, and a key pillar of the women, peace and security agenda.
But the results in Iraq’s last election were not heralded as a great step forward by women’s rights activists. As activist Arez Hussein noted, it is unwise to expect much from a politician when their electoral message has not been that they will be your voice in parliament, but has simply been “vote for the wife of Sheikh X”.
The skepticism of these activists has been proved only too right. By and large the women of Iraq’s parliament have lived up to the expectation that academic Taif Alkuhudary quoted one activist putting forward: that “women politicians are expected to be ‘decorative and not interfere or criticize’ the politics of the parties to which they owe their positions.”
When we call for greater participation and representation, it is because we believe the systems of power need to be transformed to serve the interests of those who have been ignored: changing legislatures from institutions dominated by men—and which serve only the interests of men—by making the legislatures more like the communities they serve.
Increasing women’s participation has always been a means of changing the system as a whole: it has never been the end goal.
Iraq’s political parties have turned that notion on its head. Rather than transform politics, they would transform the women’s bloc into pliable cronies so they can carry on business as usual.
While there are women MPs in Iraq’s parliament who oppose the proposals, it is extremely telling that the proportion of women MPs has never been greater while this law appears more likely to pass than ever before. Looking beyond the immediate numbers, we can see that despite the proportion of women elected going up in the last elections, the number of women putting themselves forward as candidates halved, as many potentially progressive voices refused to run due to threats and harassment.
The women’s caucus—dominated by machine politicians—acquiescing to this law is a depressing example of elite capture. Instead of promoting or even acting as a bulwark against attacks on the rights of Iraqi women, they are just another party to the political horse trading that is permitting this assault on women’s rights in exchange for votes on controversial legislation elsewhere.
I have lost count of the meetings in which some staid diplomat or politician has drawn on the old phrase that in politics, “if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” Well, Iraqi women have miraculously found themselves in a quantum superposition, simultaneously at the table while their heads are on the chopping block.
My Syrian colleague Mouna Ghanem noted at the United Nations that it was not enough for a few women to be at the table of her country’s peace process: what is needed is for the women’s agenda to be on the table.
Instead of heeding this advice, international mediation efforts only created sideshows like women’s advisory boards to the various special envoys and conflict parties. These groups were no more than ‘busy work’ for the women involved - they were not considered or treated as formal participants, they were simply paraded before the international media, to then be shunted to the side when the talks actually began.
Ultimately it has been far too easy for patriarchal institutions to assimilate our calls for the participation of women into their business-as-usual. Rather than share their power, they have created a new, second class of politician, relieved of political power.
Women’s meaningful participation and representation are though still essential means of achieving change. We need advocates for the women’s agenda in positions to make decisions and across the world there are women politicians who are striving for meaningful change to protect women and girls, to advance their rights and their participation in society. In this work, quotas do remain an important tool in order to achieve broader feminist goals but we must remember that they are not an achievement in themselves.
If the face of a legislature becomes more feminine but its actions do not become more feminist, it is not an achievement but a continuation of the status quo.
Karama webinar: What next for Syria?
Following the extraordinary collapse of the Assad regime, Karama will be hosting a discussion event with leading experts from Syria to explore the new reality on the ground. Hosted by our incredible colleague, Dr Mouna Ghanem, the webinar will take place on Monday, December 16th at 4pm Cairo / 9am Eastern.
Click below to register, we hope to see you there!
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