Lebanon's divorce and child custody laws 'discriminate against women'

The report, entitled "Unequal and Unprotected" shows that Lebanese personal status laws, which govern marriage, divorce and other family issues, are greatly disadvantageous to women.

Women stay in unhappy or abusive relationships so as not to lose custody of their children.

Divorce laws are unequal for men and women, and women are discriminated against in child custody and guardianship decisions. They are also economically marginalised and not adequately protected against domestic violence.

"For the most part, women didn't know the rules governing their marriage until there was an issue," said Lama Fakih, Syria and Lebanon Researcher at HRW. "They were unaware of the economic consequences of their separations."

The report shows that some women stay in unhappy or abusive relationships so as not to lose custody of their children or because they will not be financially compensated.

Confessionalism

Lebanon's personal status laws were established as early as 1936 as a way of allowing the different historical religious groups in the country to apply their own laws in relation to family affairs. There is little or no government oversight of these religious courts.

Lebanon, which gained independence in 1943, officially recognises 18 different religious sects, enshrining sectarianism or confessionalism in its political system. The different confessions include four Muslim and twelve Christian sects, the Druze sect and the Jewish sect, and are represented by 15 different personal status laws for family issues.

Mixed couples who want to marry without converting often go abroad, mostly to Cyprus, France and the US, to have a civil marriage, which is recognised in Lebanon.

Divorce

The result of three years of research, the HRW report incorporates 72 interviews with women from all religious confessions, and analysis of nearly 450 court cases. It shows that personal status laws and the religious courts that apply them discriminate against women across the religious sects when it comes to divorce.

"Women subject to Sunni, Shia, and Druze personal status laws have only a conditional right to end their marriage, unlike men from these groups, who have an absolute right to unilaterally terminate a marriage at will," the report says.

Although men can agree to dissolve the marriage by giving the wife "'isma", or power to divorce, the practice is uncommon thanks to habit and social pressures.

"Only three out of the 150 divorce judgements before Jaafari and Sunni courts that Human Rights Watch reviewed were issued based on the wife’s exercise of such right, and none of the women interviewed had inserted this clause into their marriage contracts," HRW said.

For women registered under the Christian confessions, things are not necessarily easier. While restrictions on ending marriage, especially for Roman Catholics, apply equally to men and women, two aspects of the law discriminate against women.

"Although spousal violence is grounds for desertion [a legal concept in Christian personal status laws that allows spouses to seperate], spousal violence in itself is insufficient to obtain an immediate end to a marriage," the report explains.

Christian men in Lebanon can unilaterally convert to Islam and remarry without divorcing their wives. - Human Rights Watch

Secondly it says: "Christian men in Lebanon can unilaterally convert to Islam and remarry without divorcing their wives [Sunni and Shia men are legally allowed up to four wives]."

In such cases, the Christian marriage remains subject to the Christian authorities under which the marriage was celebrated, "but the rights of the first wife and any children from the first marriage, particularly regarding inheritance, are diminished by the rights of the husband's second wife".

"Many women relinquish their rights to maintenance or compensation in exchange for the husband's agreement to end the marriage by converting to another Christian confession with more permissive laws."

Confessionalism and Sexism

Lebanese citizens have the right to choose their religious affiliation or to be subject to civil code in personal status matters. In 2013, Nidal Darwish and Khouloud Sukkarieh, a couple of mixed religion, invoked this right in a historic case of civil marriage in Lebanon, but they had to remove their religious affiliation from their registration records to do so.

Couples should be able to do this more easily and "shouldn't need to remove their religious affiliation" said Fakih.

However, so far social pressure and institutional sectarianism has prevented the establishment of an optional civil personal status law.

"This is not something that's going to change overnight," said Fakih. However, there is some hope: "There are a number of parliamentarians and religious leaders who have recently come out in favour of reforming the personal status laws".