Amendments to Iraq’s Personal Status Law that came into effect on February 17, 2025, fail to adequately protect women’s right to equality before the law and leave them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a release on Monday.
Various changes and retentions made by this amendment have been criticized. For instance, a newly married couple can now choose to be governed by the Personal Status Law of 1959 or a Personal Status Code. By allowing different personal law regimes to exist for different religious sects of people, the law violates Article 14 of the Iraqi Constitution which provides for equality. Articles 1 and 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), also guarantee equality to all persons regardless of, among other things, their religious beliefs.
The new law also sets the legally permissible age of marriage at 18, or 15 with the permission of a judge. Though this criteria is better than the minimum marriageable age of nine years for females as was previously anticipated, it still does not comply with the international legal standard of a minimum of 18 years, as Article 16 of the UDHR guarantees. According to UNICEF, 28 percent of girls in Iraq are already married before the age of 18, putting them at an increased risk of mental and physical abuse.
Sarah Sanbar, a researcher from Iraq at HRW, said, “It’s deeply disheartening to see Iraqi leaders move the country backward rather than forward on women and girls’ rights.Though the final text includes important revisions, particularly on the minimum age of marriage, these changes merely take the law from terrible to just plain bad.”
Consistent lobbying from women’s rights groups and civil society organizations has helped introduce positive changes through the amendment. For instance, earlier, if a dispute between a husband and wife happened, the husband had the right to select which legal regime would apply. The new law gives this discretion to the judge presiding over the dispute.