Believed to be at the forefront of women’s rights in the past, Iraq now ranks 21st out of 22 Arab states in a poll of 336 gender experts released in November 2013 by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Prior to the US invasion in 2003, Iraqi women enjoyed favorable socioeconomic conditions that precipitously declined in the past decade, ending with this new draft law which threatens to strip women of their basic rights.
Yasmine Jawad, an independent Iraqi sociologist and a social researcher in women and development, told Al-Akhbar the law “is the final nail in Iraq’s coffin.”
“The law has provisions that shamelessly degrade and dishonor women,” Hanaa Edwar, a prominent women’s rights advocate in Iraq and secretary general of the Iraqi al-Amal Association, told Al-Akhbar.
Edwar is supported by Yanar Mohammed, the president of the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq and a leading secular activist, who said, “the draft law is an abuse of children’s rights and their bodily integrity.”
The bill has been dubbed the “Jaafari Law” after the Shia Jaafari school of Islam, which some claim is the basis of many of the proponents in the law. Yet many Shia clerics in Najaf, including Najaf’s highest-ranking cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani have already distanced themselves from it, while others have stated it has nothing to do with the Jaafari school.
Furthermore, if passed, the law will only apply to Iraq’s Shia Muslims, the majority of the population, dividing the now unified judicial courts into religious courts headed by clerics.
“This law serves as a ground well suited for destroying and dividing the country under religious and sectarian pretexts,” Haitham al-Nahi, director general of the Arab Organization for Translation, told Al-Akhbar, “this is exactly what the US hoped will eventually happen.”
