Assault on family law: Iraq moving further from democracy?
The Iraqi government's attempt to change what is often called the most liberal personal status law in the Middle East has been met with protests and social media outrage.
"Here is Baghdad," Ali al-Mikdam, a journalist and human rights activist, wrote on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend about a demonstration in the Iraqi capital attended by about 500 people.
"The capital of our Iraq was not and will not be Kandahar!" he said, referring to drastically restricted women's rights in Afghanistan.
Personal status laws, or family laws, govern marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. In the Middle East, many of these are based on religion, but Iraq's Personal Status Law No. 188, passed in 1959, is less so. It basically replaced Sunni and Shiite Muslim religious courts with a civil judiciary and more liberal interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence.
But now, Iraqi politicians affiliated with conservative Shiite Muslim parties want to try and change this. Their draft bill to amend Law No. 188 was read in parliament on August 4. In response, a coalition of activists, politicians, and human rights organizations formed Alliance 188, named after the law, to organize protests all around Iraq last weekend.
"We have a civil law, and we should be changing it for good, not bad. We should not be going backward," Rasha, a local who attended the protests, told DW. The 53-year-old didn't want to give her full name because some of the protesters had been harassed. In the central Iraqi city of Najaf, police had to separate angry groups of demonstrators.
"I don't even know why they want to do this," Rasha continued. "I think they just hate the rights of women, and that's why they want to change this law. Really, I thank God I am not married, that I don't have to worry about my children in the future."
How the bill would change the personal status law
Should the changes go ahead, new rules would basically give couples a choice as to how they want their marriage to be adjudicated: By civil courts or by religious courts, whether Sunni or Shiite.
Those who want the change point out that many marriages in Iraq are only ever conducted by local clerics anyway, and they're accepted as legitimate even though they're not official by law. They argue this amendment would align the law with reality.
But for opponents of the change, the choice of legal system opens the door to potentially damaging interpretations of Islamic law. For example, under current Iraqi law, the legal age for marriage is 18. Under religious rules, activists argue children as young as nine years old could be wed.
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