WOMEN RIGHTS IN LIBANESE EPUBLIC

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4 CMI REPORT NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2017
NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2017 CMI REPORT 5 I. INTRODUCTION: WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN LEBANON The Lebanese constitution guarantees equality among its citizens (article 7): All Lebanese shall be equal before the law. They shall equally enjoy civil and political rights and shall equally be bound by public obligations and duties without any distinction. Moreover, Lebanon has ratified a number of international conventions that seek to protect and promote human rights in general and women’s rights in particular, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 1 Lebanon is also committed to implementing the Beijing Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals: in 1996 it created a National Commission for Lebanese Women (NCLW), the first body to be officially charged with promoting women’s rights and gender equality in Lebanon. 2 In December 2016, the newly formed government of Prime Minister Saad Al-Hariri made a landmark decision to introduce a Ministry for Women’s Affairs for the first time in the country’s history. 3 The Ministry for Women’s Affairs has already proposed a draft law for dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace and is currently promoting the introduction of a quota for women in the Parliament of Lebanon, at a time when the country is gearing up for much awaited national parliamentary elections. Nonetheless, despite Lebanon’s political commitment at the national and international levels to promote and protect women’s rights, Lebanese laws, both civil and religious, discriminate against women. Not only does Lebanon’s legal framework treat Lebanese women as inferior to men with regard to personal status issues (such as marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance), but Lebanon’s pluralistic religious law system treats Lebanese women as unequal among themselves. For example, consider two Lebanese mothers, one Sunni and one Shi’ite, each with a male two-year old child. Due to the different religious laws that apply to each mother, if they were both to get a divorce, the Sunni mother would be able to keep her son with her until he was 12, whereas the Shi’ite mother would automatically lose custody of her toddler to her Shi’ite husband, regardless of whether she was deemed to be a fit mother or not (see part III.C below for more details). This report documents and analyzes two recent major reforms in Lebanese law whose purpose is to further gender equality for women in Lebanon: (i) the alteration of the Sunni personal status law to allow mothers to keep their children with them for a longer time following divorce and (ii) the promulgation of Law no. 293 of 2014, which deals with domestic violence. The first reform relates to the religiously based, personal status laws that control major aspects of a woman’s life in Lebanon. The second reform shows the importance of civil law in the fight for women’s rights and gender equality in the country and exemplifies, through its text and its implementation, the power struggle between Lebanon’s secular, progressive civil society and its patriarchal religious establishment. Indeed, Law no. 293 and the court decisions based on this law reflect “encroachment” on Lebanon’s religious law and on the religious establishment’s monopoly over the lives of women. This encroachment is due to interconnectedness between the issue dealt with in the civil law (domestic violence) and the issues already addressed by Lebanon’s religious personal status laws (a woman’s right to leave the marital home to escape an abusive husband, to take her children with her when she goes, and to obtain spousal and child 1 Lebanon ratified CEDAW with reservations to articles 9(2); 16(1)(c), (d), (f), and (g); and 29(2). For an analysis of the roots of this reservation, see Dabbous-Sensenig (2005). 2 The NCLW was created by Ministerial Decree No. 13 on 3 January 1996. 3 The excitement that creating such a ministry stirred among civil rights activists was dampened by the fact (seen to be ironical by some) that a male minister was appointed to head this ministry (McKernan 2016).
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