Picture made by the Iraqi Women’s Journalist’s Forum to campaign against the latest attempt to reformulate the Ja’fari law.Feminists and civil society activists in Iraq are calling once again for the withdrawal of a proposition made by two parliamentary commissions, the legal and the Awkaf, to re-introduce in a new form the previously rejected Ja’fari law. On the pretext of reforming the Personal Status Code relying on the very polemical article 41 of the Constitution, a group of parliamentarians are willing to introduce a sectarian family law based on Shi’a jurisprudence breaking with the existing one that applies for Sunnis and Shi’as alike.
Questioning a unifying and a more egalitarian legacy
Challenging the Law n°188 of 1959 is not new in Iraq. The law includes legislation related to personal status such as marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance etc. constituting the Personal Status Code (also known as Family Law in other Arab countries). Since 2003, Shi’a Islamist political parties who came to power with the US-led coalition forces, pushed for a reassessment of the unified PSC which relies on both Sunni and Shi’a jurisprudence. They presented different propositions all of which introduce the possibility of a sectarian based PSC: Decree 137 proposed in 2003, Article 41 of the new Iraqi Constitution adopted in 2005 and more recently the Ja’fari Law proposition in 2014.
That last law is named after the main school of jurisprudence of Shi’a Muslims in Iraq the Ja’fari mazhab. It contains articles that can allow the marriage of girls from the age of 9 considered as sin al-Balagha (the age of maturity) in the Ja’fari jurisprudence. It can also allow precarious forms of marriage in which women could lose basic legal protection. The Ja’fari law represents a rupture with the PSC. On the one hand, it questions what is considered by Iraqis as a historical gain in terms of legal rights such as the minimum legal age of marriage fixed at 18 years old for both sexes, and the limit imposed on polygamy and unions contracted outside the civil court. On the other hand, it also constitutes a rupture with the unifying and non-sectarian nature of the PSC that gathers both Sunni and Shi’a jurisprudence and thus is applied to both sects and renders possible intersect marriages.
