IRAQ: As constitutional committee members struggle to agree on rules for governing the Iraqi state, women's groups say they cannot endorse a draft that gives excessive weight to Islamic legal traditions.
At stake are long-standing laws that give women approximate equality to men in marriage and inheritance, as well as a quota system that guarantees female representation in parliament.
"After talking with constitutional committee members and viewing some of their partial drafts, we realised that the constitution focuses on differences between men and women," lawyer Tamim Jalil al-Azawi said at a meeting of women's groups on Sunday. "That is the opposite of what we're seeking."
Committee chairman Humam Hamoudi, a Shia cleric, has insisted that partial drafts should not be heeded while negotiations are still in progress. But he suggested that the committee's Shia, Sunni and Kurdish factions had reached agreement on the parts of the constitution that dealt with women's rights.
At the behest of the Shia-dominated majority bloc in parliament, committee drafters have reportedly decided to revive "order 137", a decision by the former US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council that would allow unregistered marriages, so a man could take a second wife without seeking his first wife's consent.
US officials blocked the decision, and women's rights came to be protected under Transitional Administrative Law, Iraq's US-drafted provisional constitution.
Women's activists fear the striking down of Iraq's 1959 personal status law, which allowed women to leave their husbands without negating their claims for custody of children.