The draft law establishing a new fund to help ensure alimony gets properly paid has been recently approved. But is it enough? Parliament finally approved the family security fund (FSF) law during its closing session two weeks ago, Reem Leila reports. The law is meant to guarantee that women receive a certain percentage of the alimony they or their children deserve. Financial concerns delayed the law's approval for five months. An agreement was finally worked out, however, between the Ministry of Insurance and Social Affairs, the Nasser Social Bank (NSB), and the Ministry of Justice. The fund will be driven by donations from individuals, and government allocations. Additional fees on marriage and divorce contracts, as well as birth certificates, will also be added to the pot. There will also be interest earned from a trust fund into which all these monies will go. Along with the new family court law, the FSF law will be implemented by 1 October 2004. With nearly 400,000 marriages, and 60,000 divorces, registered per year, the extra LE50 being added to each registration should provide a good deal of funding. The extra LE25 being added to the cost of registering the nearly 1.7 million newly born infants annually will also help. According to Serri Siam, assistant to the minister of justice for legislative affairs, the amount that will be provided by the fund in alimony for deserving women and children will range between LE100-300 per month. "Unfortunately", Siam said, this is the only amount that can be allocated for the time being. "It may be insufficient, but it's definitely better than nothing," he said. In order to qualify, women must provide their original court ruling indicating the amount of alimony due to them, in addition to a subsequent court order enforcing the original ruling. "Without this [latter] document, women will not be able to collect their money," said Cairo University Faculty of Law Dean Ahmed El-Sawi. Once the documents are presented to the FSF, a committee will then determine the amount of money that will be provided. Since that amount will usually be less than what the court ordered, the woman will then present her case to the new family court system, which begins operation in October 2005, in order to obtain a sentence indicating the rest of the amount she is entitled to. El-Sawi said only impoverished women would benefit from the new law. "It is totally unreasonable to expect a woman with an LE3000 alimony ruling, for instance, to apply for a maximum of LE300." Thirty-eight-year-old tour guide Heba Zahran said that even though "lots of women will benefit from this new law, many more will definitely not". Zahran, who has a 12-year-old girl, said her ex-husband owes her five years worth of court-ordered alimony -- a whopping LE52,000. "How would LE300 help me?" she wondered. "This will be really ridiculous and frustrating for many women," Zahran said Lawyer Abdel-Hadi Ghozzi declared the new law a waste of time. "The application process will waste time, as will going back to the judge to determine the remaining amount." Ghozzi said it would have been much better to "help women get all their money from one source, rather than make them go through all these absurd procedures".
