Protests threaten Afghan women’s rights law
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan women, and sometimes even little girls, are sold or traded to pay family debts. Socalled honor killings are a constant threat to women, especially in the country’s vast rural areas, where even talking to a man who is not a close relative can be perceived as a transgression punishable by death.
Betrothals of girls as young as age 7 are not unknown; in some parts of the country, girls are routinely married at puberty.
The only law that at least attempted to hold families accountable for such treatment is now itself in danger.
The country’s tiny women’s rights movement faces an unenviable decision: Leave the law intact despite its flaws or continue to try to present changes to Parliament, where a growing conservative movement could dismantle the protections entirely.
The dangers of trying to amend the law became evident Saturday, when a bid to add more robust protections was rapidly withdrawn in Parliament amid stinging rebukes.
Angry mullahs and conservatives who never supported the law in the first place complained that the measure and the proposed revisions were un-Islamic, and they asked who could better decide than they who and when their daughters should marry.
Some women in Parliament were not supportive either, citing the measure’s backing of shelters for battered women.
Many Afghans believe shelters are seen as brothels and tarnish a girl’s reputation.
The protests were strong enough that it became clear that even the law’s minimal legal protections could be at risk if the debate continued.
The proposal for revisions was sent back to the committee that had worked on it.
The push to bring up the law at all had split Afghanistan’s small wom- en’s rights community in recent days, with fears that the conservatives would undo it entirely battling a sense that quick action had to be taken before the exit of the United States, after which conservatism will most likely gain strength.
“We know who is in the Parliament,” said Soraya Sobrang, a women’s rights activist and part of a hastily organized effort to stop the law from coming up in Parliament, referring to the former militia commanders, mullahs and other conservatives who take a dim view of many of the Western-backed changes in Afghanistan.
What would stop them, she asked, “from pulling a list from their back pocket” of changes that would weaken the protections against child marriage or even rape?