controversial new law proposes one court for shia, another for sunni

 

niqash | Mustafa Habib | Baghdad | 31.10.2013

Last week Iraq’s Minister of Justice announced two new, potential laws that will impact on how ordinary Iraqis divorce, marry and inherit. Supporters of the laws say they should be free to choose whether they want to be judged in a religious court. But opponents of the laws say that by splitting the country in half in legal terms, already heated sectarian tensions will only be inflamed further. 

In the middle of last week Iraq's Minister of Justice, Hassan al-Shammari, announced that two controversial laws – one on personal status and another on judiciary proceedings – had been drafted and that they were being sent to the State Shura Council for review. The Shura Council is responsible for reviewing all draft legislation to ensure conformity with Iraqi law and the Iraqi Constitution.   

The two laws would work together to regulate matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, inheritance and the custody of minors. The first was about personal status  that is, whether one is single, divorced and so forth – and the second would deal with which court made those decisions and arbitrated on those kinds of statuses.

This is all despite the fact that Iraq already has a personal status law, formulated in 1959 and widely considered to be one of the most liberal of its kind in the Middle East.

It’s for this reason that the potential introduction of the two new pieces of legislation is controversial. And it’s even more controversial because, while the old law was seen as being more universal, and not discriminating between Iraq’s different sects and ethnicities, the new laws may well escalate sectarian tensions.