Did the personal status laws issued during the rule of former president Hosni Mubarak help or damage Egyptian families, asks Reem Leila After former president Hosni Mubarak was driven from power in February this year, many hundreds of people began demonstrating against the personal status laws issued during his rule, arguing that these had harmed Egyptian families. On 27 April, dozens of demonstrators congregated in front of the Press Syndicate in Cairo to demand the amendment of the laws, accusing former first lady Suzanne Mubarak of harming Egyptian families through the role she played in helping to pass the laws. Among these laws is an increase in the age mothers have custody of their children from nine to 15 years, a law on visiting rights for divorced parents, and the khul' law on divorce, which some have argued has led to higher rates of divorce and more broken homes. Yet, while some are demanding the repeal of the laws, others have argued that the laws, known as "Suzanne's laws", have helped millions of families. Advocates of the laws rallied in front of the Al-Azhar Islamic Research Centre (IRC) in Cairo three weeks ago to protest against any amendments to the laws. According to Fawzia Abdel-Sattar, a professor of law at Cairo University and a former member of the People's Assembly, the lower house of the Egyptian parliament, all personal status laws are derived from Islamic Sharia law. "Most of the current personal status laws were issued before Mubarak came to power, and they go back to the 1920s," she said. The laws issued during Mubarak's rule, such as Law 100/1985 on women's alimony rights, Law 1/2000 on personal status procedural law, and the khul' law are all based on Islamic Sharia, she argued. Contrary to the criticisms now being made of the khul' law on divorce, Abdel-Sattar said, this law had actually helped decrease the number of cases of divorce. Before this law was passed, when disputes occurred between married couples and it became impossible for the marriage to continue, the husband would sometimes begin a vicious process of financial bargaining or become blindly obstinate with no goal in his head except to hurt his estranged wife, Abdel-Sattar said. Under the khul' law, wives have a valid and swift alternative to previous procedures that favoured the husband in cases of divorce. "According to the khul' law, a woman has the right to ask for a divorce and simply has to return to the husband the amount of money paid to her," Abdel-Sattar said. Moreover, Article 20 of Law 25/1929, amended in 2005, stipulates that the children of divorced parents may remain in their mother's custody until the age of 15. The article extends the amount of time children can remain with their mothers, and it acknowledges the child's right to have a say in determining guardianship. Abdel-Sattar said that IRC approval had been a prerequisite for introducing these amendments before the People's Assembly, and IRC member Abdel-Moeti Bayoumi also told Al-Ahram Weekly in an interview that the council had unanimously approved the amendments since they did not contradict Islamic Sharia. "The new law takes children's welfare into consideration," Bayoumi said, and it had been approved by Mufti Ali Gomaa. Both Abdel-Sattar and Bayoumi argued that it was permissible under Islamic Sharia for a child to remain in his or her mother's custody as long as he or she had basic needs. "Why blame Mrs Mubarak for these laws," they asked. "They both follow and are based on Islamic regulations." However, Abdallah El-Baga, head of appeals at the Family Court, disagreed, arguing that the laws have increased the number of divorce cases in Egypt. Although El-Baga believes that the khul' law is not against Islamic regulations and is mentioned in the Holy Quran, women should only be granted khul' by the Family Courts on appeal, he said. According to El-Baga, cases of divorce in Egypt have been growing. In 2008, there were 51,775 cases reported in the country, compared to 46,250 in 2007. In 2006, there were 39,407 cases, and 39,292 in 2005. "There are now more than 250,000 women involved in court battles over divorce, in which the woman is asking for a divorce without stating a reason or having to prove anything other than incompatibility with her husband, as stipulated in the amended khul' law of 2000," he said. El-Baga believes that the age at which children should leave their mother's custody should be reduced to nine for girls and seven for boys, as it was before the amended law was introduced. "Children, especially girls, are in need of their father's firmness, especially when they are young. When they grow up and by the time they are 15, the value of this firmness will be lost, and children will act and feel as if their father had no authority over them," he said. Not everyone agrees, however. Farkhonda Hassan, the former secretary-general of the National Council for Women (NCW), complains of moves to cancel laws introduced by the former regime just because they were introduced by that regime. Women in Egypt in the past were oppressed and were the victims of injustice, Hassan said. "But when we give them their rights, people say that the laws have ruined Egyptian families, which is nonsense and absurd." In El-Baga's view, the law on non-custodial parents' visiting rights should also be amended, especially since the age of maternal custody presently stands at 15. "During the former regime, laws were amended to suit the friends of the wife of the former president. Now that we have had a revolution, the laws must change, especially in cases where they favour one party over the other," he said. Non-custodial parents have recently been stirring up public opinion against the law on visiting rights, arguing that it damages their relationships with their children. At the moment, the law says that the children of divorced parents should live with only one parent, usually the mother, as long as they are under the age of 15. As a result, "in most cases, it's the fathers who find themselves in front of a judge asking to see their children," El-Baga said. "The law should be modified to increase the duration of visits and allow fathers to take their children home with them for one or two days." In response, Hassan said that the personal status laws had not been tailored to suit any one group of people, arguing that they had instead been designed to serve society as a whole. "They are all based on Islamic Sharia, and they were all approved by the IRC and Al-Azhar before the People's Assembly passed them," she said.
