ALGIERS, 10 March 2004 — A government-backed commission on Monday proposed reforming Algeria’s controversial family code to give women more rights, a move seen linked to upcoming presidential elections.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, seeking re-election on April 8, has come under pressure for failing to live up to his 1999 election promise to give more rights in a country where 52 percent of the 32 million population are women.
“The current law makes a woman minor from birth to death. She has only one right — to shut up,” said Ouardia Harhad, spokeswoman for the independent women’s rights group Aitdf.
“The only time in a woman’s life she can consider herself not a minor is when she votes or commits a crime.”
The government commission was set up in October to quell mounting criticism in the Muslim North African country, particularly after neighboring Morocco said it would improve women’s rights in marriage and divorce.
Algeria’s 1984 family code forces women to seek approval from a male family member to marry, authorizes polygamy and gives men the right to divorce without reason and offers women little maintenance for caring for her children.
Chafika Ait Benamar, a parliamentary member of the commission, told state radio the reform would propose allowing women to marry without family consent from the age of 19, the same as men.
The husband would have to give greater financial support in case of a unilateral decision to separate. He would also have to provide accommodation for the children and their mother. Stricter rules would be applied in case of polygamy, she said.
The reform would be put to a vote in Parliament, Ait Benamar said without giving a date.
Louisa Hanoun, the first woman to run for president in Algeria and leader of the small Trotskyite opposition Workers’ Party, told a news conference: “It’s a positive first step. The current family code boosts oppression and discrimination.”
A rare national health survey, published in newspaper El-Watan, showed married women were significantly more subjected to violence than single women.
Women have fewer rights than in Morocco and Tunisia, a fact many Algerians are embarrassed about given the role women played in fighting for independence from colonial France and opposing the rise of fundamentalism in the 1990s.
Political analysts said Bouteflika initially shelved the plan because of opposition from Islamic parties.
On Sunday, leading opposition presidential candidate Ali Benflis said he would give women more rights if he won.
Separately, Bouteflika pardoned 242 women imprisoned on Monday on the occasion of the international women’s day. Women sentenced for “terrorism” were excluded. The sentences of the prisoners, all serving sentences for common law crimes, will be totally or partially lifted, and 139 jailed women will be freed immediately, the officials said.
Women convicted of “acts of terrorism or subversion” were not included in the pardon, they said.
The pardons illustrated “the desire of the president to work tirelessly to promote a culture of tolerance and to develop a spirit of national harmony by giving Algerian women a place that corresponds to their responsibilities in society, and the respect in which all Algerians should hold them,” said the officials.
Meanwhile, government troops in Chad battled Algerian armed extremists yesterday, after killing four of them and capturing another in the far north of the country, a Chadian military source said.
A large Algerian group of fighters, heavily armed members of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), was intercepted on Monday at Data in the arid Tibesti highlands close to the border with Niger, said the source, who asked not to be named.
They were riding six all-terrain pickup trucks, at least one of which had an Algerian license plate and was fitted with a heavy machine gun when Chadian soldiers seized it on Monday.
The fighters on the five other vehicles pulled back to a cave where they were putting up stiff resistance yesterday against Chadian troops who had surrounded them, the source said.
