By
Van Meguerditchian
BEIRUT:
Civil society activists and the Lebanese Forces have criticized changes to a
draft law intended to protect women from domestic violence, after the
parliamentary subcommittee discussing the draft rephrased it to address
families rather than women.
The
Women’s rights group KAFA (Enough Violence & Exploitation) and the LF said
Wednesday that lawmakers in the subcommittee are shifting the law’s focus from
women to the family.
The
committee decided to change the title of the bill from “protecting women from
family violence” to “protecting the entire family from violence, based on what
it has called constitutional grounds.
Earlier
this week, the LF’s representative on the committee, Zahle MP Shant Janjanian,
quit the talks in protest against the amendments.
But
Metn MP Ghassan Moukheiber, a member of the committee, told The Daily Star it
would be unconstitutional for the law to address only women.
“We
cannot rule out the fact that they themselves [women] can exercise certain
forms of violence against men,” Moukheiber said.
“I
understand that it is rare to find violence by women against men, but [such
cases] do exist,” he said.
Moukheiber
criticized KAFA and the LF for their recent campaign against the committee,
calling it counterproductive and their accusations “baseless.”
“Unfortunately
there is a tendency to assume that whatever this committee does will be a
failure for women’s rights ... when in reality we have improved the tools of
the law and made them effective for protecting women,” Moukheiber added.
But
Janjanian fired back, saying that domestic violence is mainly against women,
because it is rooted in a structure of male-female domination. He called
marital rape, which was criminalized in the bill and removed by the committee,
one way of perpetuating this domination.
“Despite
a number of meetings, many of the MPs continue to stick to their argument that
criminalizing marital rape would facilitate the break-down of the Lebanese
family,” Janjanian told The Daily Star.
“The
NGOs campaigning for this draft law wanted to address the violence women are
being subjected to in their families and the current title of the law is
completely different,” he added.
Janjanian’s
LF colleague, Bsharri MP Strida Geagea, reiterated the party’s call for a law
to protect women from domestic violence, arguing that any change to the title
of the law would ignore reality.
“Women’s
rights groups have spent years [working] to reveal the violence being practiced
against women, especially in families,” she said Thursday.
“The
LF insists on criminalizing all forms of violence against women, especially
marital rape, which the Lebanese Penal Code does not criminalize,” she added.
The
marital rape clause is the second major topic of dispute between the committee
and activists.
The
original draft said that “someone who forces his spouse to have intercourse
through violence and/or intimidation will be punished from six months to two
years in jail.”
Lawmakers
have now rephrased it to: “When one seeks to perform his marital rights to
intercourse and beat his wife [in doing so], he will be punished pursuant to
the Penal Code’s Articles 554-559.”
Articles
554 to 559 of the Penal Code deal with “punishing those involved in injuring a
person who, as a consequence, suffers illness or incapacity to work for a
certain period of time.”
Janjanian
said the LF wanted to “remain committed to the principles we had initially
agreed on with the rights groups, and I hope my withdrawal from the committee
will step up pressure on the members who have so far failed to stand against
marital rape.”
Women’s
rights groups say that if women are raped by their husbands, an obstacle to
punishment is the newly drafted Article 26 that gives the country’s personal
status law, which apply to each recognized sect, priority in the law.
According
to Article 26, if there is a conflict between clauses in the law and the
personal status laws of a given sect, personal status laws override the draft.
Leila
Awada, one of KAFA’s co-founders, criticized the MPs for endorsing Article 26.
She said Moukheiber, who had initially been against the article, was now silent
on the issue.
“We
insist the government recognize and condemn violence against women, as they
vowed to do so in its mission statement,” Awada said in reference to the policy
statement Cabinet issued last June. “No one is saying that women can’t file a
lawsuit and need legal help to file a law suit – what we are calling for is to
criminalize marital rape, and ensure the presence of protective orders for
women,” Awada added.
“So what if some women
can’t prove that they were the victim of rape?” she asked, alluding to the
difficulty of proving such charges in certain cases. “We need to draft this law
anyway because a law is meant to punish a crime, not to prove it.”
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2012/Jun-15/176907-protection-of-women-a-matter-of-dispute.ashx#axzz1xnReWakn
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