2023-08-28 08:00:00
Published on its website, the 119-page report, titled “Trapped: How Male Guardianship Policies Restrict Women’s Travel and Mobility in the Middle East and North Africa” in the Middle East and North Africa”) examines 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa region and describes the different requirements for women to obtain permission from their male guardian to move within their country, to obtain a passport and to travel abroad. HRW is also examining whether women can travel abroad with their children as guardians on an equal basis with men. The defenders of these male guardianship policies in the region justify these rules by the concern to protect women.
To read: Morocco: divorced women call for the lifting of the guardianship of the father
While some countries such as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have removed provisions on women’s obedience to their husbands, which led to restrictions on their movements, the organization finds that 15 countries in the region such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, continue to apply personal status or family laws that force women to “obey” their husbands, to live with him or to ask his permission to leave the marital home, work or travel. Courts can order women to return to their marital home or lose their right to alimony, it says.
To read: Can a woman travel alone in Morocco? An American’s response
Emphasizing that the 2004 Family Code removed the requirement for women to obey their husbands and instead provides for husband and wife to jointly manage household affairs, following a campaign by women’s rights activists who called for the recognition of Islamic concepts of respect and equality in marriage and that Morocco’s 2011 Constitution guarantees freedom of movement for all, including “the freedom to move and national territory, to leave it and to return there, in accordance with the law”, Human Rights Watch notes, however, that other discriminatory provisions once morest women remain.
To read: Why are Moroccan women banned from staying in hotels?
Despite the absence of a law, single Moroccan women are prohibited from staying in hotels in the kingdom. Faced with the persistence of this discriminatory practice, the Minister of the Interior, in July 2014 and once more in September 2022, declared that his department had never issued such instructions to hotels, the organization reports.
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