As the 20th anniversary of the reform of the Mudawana or Family Code approaches – which marked a modernizing milestone in Morocco by granting women the right to request a divorce, among other advances – King Mohamed VI, who will turn who has been on the throne for 25 years, has called on the Government to present a draft revision of the legislation before next March 26. Despite the prohibitions established in 2004, legal exceptions to personal status discriminate against Moroccan women by tolerating residual polygamy, which affects 2% of marriages, and marriages of minors. Women also continue to lose the right to guardianship of their minor children in the event of separation from their husbands and see their hereditary rights restricted with respect to their brothers, and even their uncles and cousins. Faced with the upcoming reform of the Mudawana, Moroccan feminist organizations have put together a common front against the veto posed by conservative and religious sectors reluctant to modify norms that they consider divinely inspired.
Forums such as the Foundations of Feminism, held last weekend in Rabat, have taken place in Morocco since on September 26, Mohamed VI gave six months to the Government of the Moroccan Prime Minister, Aziz Ajanuch, to present a proposal to reform the Family Code. The monarch of the Alawite dynasty had already raised the need to review the Mudawana in a speech to the nation in July 2022, but the Executive preferred to wait for the willingness for royal arbitration to be expressed in view of the rejection expressed by the Party of Justice and Development (PJD), the Islamist formation that headed the Government between 2011 and 2021.
The Association for the Promotion of the Culture of Equality has organized the first edition of the conference on feminism with associations, professionals and experts who have debated in Rabat around the question: “What reform of the Family Code do we want?” The journalist Aicha Zaimi Sajri, 57 years old, responsible for the organization, specifies that the forum has sought to “serve as a bridge between the generations of the Moroccan feminist movement, the historical group, which cut its teeth in the mobilizations of the nineties of the last century. , which preceded the Mudawana reform of 2004, and the young activists, professionals active in the digital protest campaigns of recent years.
The Association for the Promotion of the Culture of Equality aspires to present, “from a progressive profile”, the conclusions of the debates of The Foundations of Feminism. They will be formulated before a commission made up of the Ministry of Justice and judicial associations, which is collecting proposals from parties, NGOs and civil society to present a project to reform the Family Code, points out Sajri, founder of Magazine Women of Morocco (Women of Morocco), which three decades ago gave voice to feminism in the Maghreb country for the first time.
The gaps in the 2004 legislation, which was born “obsolete”, according to feminist associations, reduced the effectiveness of a reform that set a precedent in Muslim countries. As Amir the Moominin o Commander of the Believers, in his powers as a religious leader, Mohamed VI has laid the foundations for the legislative review with this maxim: “I cannot authorize what God has prohibited, but neither can I prevent what the Almighty has authorized.” In conclusion, he has asked the ulama or Islamic cleric experts to determine what are the prescriptions on the family collected in the Quran, which inspires the sharia or religious law in a country in which Islam is the state religion. But it also demands that they expunge from the legal text the empties of religious tradition for centuries. As the writer and scholar of Islamic theology Asma Lamrabet maintains, these are impositions introduced by the jurisprudence of Muslim clerics, without basis in the Koran. The king has stressed that the Family Code “must adapt to the evolution of society.”
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Parental guardianship
Nuzha Skali, 73, was among the oldest attendees at the Rabat feminist forum. Minister of Social Development and Family between 2007 and 2011, and deputy for the Party of Progress and Socialism (formerly the Communist Party) when the Mudawana was amended in 2004, she is the living memory of Moroccan feminism. “The reforms of the first decade of Mohamed VI's reign were culminated with the 2011 Constitution, which enshrined equality between men and women. But her 2022 speech came after a decade of stagnation (PJD governments between 2011 and 2021), in which a misogynistic discourse has been established in Morocco,” defends this historical leader, who participated in the founding of the Democratic Women's Association. from Morocco. “Society has evolved a lot in 20 years, the age of marriage has been delayed and now men marry, on average, at 32 years old, and women, at 27 years old.”
The current parental guardianship regulations can prevent separated women from traveling abroad with their children if they do not have written permission from their ex-husband to be able to present him at the border. “And, above all, we must reform succession legislation that is in contradiction with the Constitution and international conventions ratified by Morocco,” adds former minister Skali. If there are male brothers, the daughters inherit only half as much as they do. If there are none, by the tradition of Taasib (male line of agnation) they are obliged to share assets with uncles or cousins, who can even strip them of family assets.
The issues of inheritance and shared guardianship and custody seem to have serious possibilities of being reformed now for the benefit of women, according to Moroccan feminist organizations. “We present a platform of maximums knowing that we will not get all our demands accepted,” admits Sujri, organizer of the forum held in Rabat.
In the antipodes of the predominant discourse in the feminist debate, the Justice and Development Party openly declares itself in favor of the marriage of minors “for social reasons.” One of its leaders, Mustafa Azami, warns that the party's principles “are based on Islamic law.” The general secretary of the PJD, former prime minister Abdelilah Benkiran, has accused the feminist movement of representing only “French-minded women disconnected from the social reality of Morocco,” by demanding a total ban on polygamy and underage marriage. “They live in the clouds, and belong to a bourgeois elite in a comfortable economic situation.” At the luxurious Sofitel hotel in Rabat, where the feminist conference was held, hijabs or turbans were barely visible on the heads of the attendees, among whom French was the lingua franca.
Current legislation prohibits marriage with minors (up to 18 years of age), although it allows judges to authorize a girl to marry an adult man. In 2022, more than 20,000 marriage applications for minors were registered in Morocco. Two thirds of them (13,652) were accepted by the magistrates, according to the annual report of the Attorney General's Office.
The Mudawana of 2004 also vetoed polygamy, a practice reduced to 2% of Moroccan households, unless approved by the first wife. There are men, however, who resort to concubinage with another woman. When they have a child, they go to court to authorize the second marriage in order to recognize paternity. Divorce is usually the alternative for the opposing spouse.
Towards a compromise solution
At the Rabat feminist forum, Laila Slassi, a 39-year-old lawyer trained in France, founder of the collective Massaktach (I won't shut up) specialized since 2018 in the defense of women victims of sexual violence, represents a generation of activists who are developing with ease on social networks, and in some cases, such as influencers: “We distribute whistles to women who feel harassed when walking alone in the streets,” she recalls. “In Morocco, the penalties for sexual assault are high, up to 30 years in the case of a minor, but they are not applied in judicial reality,” questions this lawyer.
Cases such as that of an 11-year-old girl, raped by three men for months in a village in Morocco and threatened with death if she reported her attackers, did not come to light until her pregnancy revealed her ordeal. In the first trial, the defendants received a paltry sentence of just two years in prison. The popular indication led a higher court to rectify and punish the guilty with between 10 and 20 years in prison. “She was lucky that feminist activists took up her case,” says Slassi, “but unfortunately, these are common sentences in Moroccan courts.”
“In addition to updating the Family Code, it is time to also reform the Penal Code,” he warns. Two thirds of the cases of sexual violence that come to court affect minors. “This means that women of legal age file few complaints,” laments the lawyer and activist. “If they do so and their case is filed, they risk being criminally prosecuted for having extramarital sexual relations, punishable by up to one year in prison.”
The discrimination suffered by women in Morocco has its roots in an era when men exclusively supported families. Despite the low rate of female employment, currently, about a fifth of households are supported only by women, and up to a third of families depend on the contribution of female labor to survive. “It is inevitable that the new Family Code ends up being a compromise text,” admits Slassi, “in view of the fractures in society, in a country with enormous differences between cities and rural areas, where equality and justice are not guaranteed for all women.”
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