Injustices and loopholes abuse Moroccan women’s rights

Our nation will choose, on September 8, the future political party that will govern the next five years in Morocco. After 10 years of PJD, the moderate Islamic party, in the head of government and the majority of parliament, it’s time to examine the situation of women’s rights in Morocco, to count our gains and our loses, and ask what Moroccan women need to be more free, independent and safe.

Equality and religion

Few months before the 2011 election, the Moroccan government announced the abolition of all its reservations to articles nine and sixteen in the International Convention against All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

Although Article 9 of the Convention no longer poses any problem after Chapter VI of the new Moroccan Nationality Law granted women the right to confer their nationality to their children, Article 16 urges the signatory states to guarantee the same rights and responsibilities for men and women during marriage and at its dissolution, as well as guardianship and adoption of children.

Justice and development party, who was in the opposition back then, condemned the reservations’ lift and considered it as “a serious harm” to the Islamic reference of the Moroccan state.
Few months after, PJD sweep the polls in the 2011 elections and Article 16 didn’t been legislated until now.

In an interview with Hespress Eng, Ghizlane Mamouni, a lawyer and an activist in the Moroccan NGO “coalition 490” known as Moroccan outlaws 490, explained: “ according to Moroccan Law, men have the ultimate Legal Prosecution over the children during the marriage or after divorce, even that the guardianship is secured to the divorced mother. I find this Legal Prosecution a big injustice.”

Mamouni cites examples of cases she witnessed to explain the injustice laid in this law, “In many cases, the father abandons his family and the mother assumes the financial responsibility of raising her children. However, she cannot obtain a certificate of transferring her son from one school to another, without the father’s consent, despite the fact that she is solely responsible for his care. Needless to say that the father can execute all these institutional operations without going back to the mother.”

She further explained, “There are other cases that highlight the extent of unfairness practiced against women, including the mother’s guaranteeing the expenses of her son’s medical treatment after a car accident, without having the right to benefit from compensation from insurance companies unless the father is present.”

As Shariaa law was the argument to oppose the equality of guardianship, PJD used the same argument to defend the inequality of inheritance between women and men, claiming that legalizing equality of inheritance would be an abuse to a clear religious text.

The debate about inheritance started, in 2015, in Morocco, when the National Council for Human Rights presented a report containing a recommendation on equality between men and women in the inheritance system. At the time, the report met with harsh criticism from Abdelilah Benkirane, then Prime Minister of Morocco. He accused the council and its president of “inciting sedition”, saying that “the inheritance is a religion, not politics, and that God Almighty resolved the issue by saying, “God commands you in your children for the male like the luck of two females.”

If Benkiran quoted Quran texts and religious laws to justify this inequality, Hassan Adili, member of the parliament for the PJD party used, in a recent interview with Hespress Eng, King Hassan 2 words as an argument, “the monarchy doesn’t make permissible what is forbidden and doesn’t deprive what is permissible.”

Morocco’s 2011 Constitution, which has been announced by Moroccan King Mohammed VI and voted on by the Moroccan people, stresses equality between men and women. However, the relatively progressive Moroccan family code, a document outlining the laws and rules relating to family matters, fails to uphold equality in matters of inheritance.

After the death of a parent, daughters of the deceased inherit half of what their male relatives receive, and according to the ta’sib rule, “female orphans who do not have a brother must share the inheritance with the male relative closest to the deceased…even if [he is] unknown and [has] never been part of the family.”

Mamouni commented on the matter with a bitter laugh, saying: “this is [the contradiction between the laws] imaginative and unbelievable” she added, “enough is enough, women, nowadays, work as much as men and we cannot keep forgiving this oppression and inequity.”

However, Mamouni is optimist towards the new report submitted on May 25 to King Mohammed VI, by the Special Commission on the Development Model (CSMD) that listed four main axes of transformation to achieve the objectives of the new development model, one of them calls for equality between men and women in different rights. “ I have high hopes that this rapport will achieve the wished freedom between genders in Morocco, even though they excluded individual rights from the rapport”, Mamouni stated to Hespress Eng.

Abortion: Motherhood should never be forced

While everyone debates the unborn right of life, a huge number of the born come to life to be abandoned in orphanages or trash cans.

In 2019, Activist Aïcha Echenna exposed worrying figures at the annual meeting organized by the NGO “Movimiento por la paz” (Movement for Peace). She warned about the rate of abandoned children in Morocco following births outside marriage.
“Morocco wants everything, which is why we live with schizophrenia. The reality is that 50,000 children are abandoned every year. In addition, on average, 24 babies are thrown in the trash per day. There is no official number of single mothers, but 10 years ago it was already over half a million, “says Aisha in the annual meeting.

The American website “Fact Slides” revealed, in 2018, that Morocco is the first Arab country in abortion, although it is prohibited by law, while it ranked eighth in the world.
The figures of the Moroccan Association for Family Planning speak of an upper ceiling of 80,000 abortions per year. While the Moroccan Association for Combating Secret Abortion reports that the number of abortions ranges between 600 and 800 per day.

Lawyer Mamouni, in her interview with Hespress Eng, commented “The prohibition of abortion won’t stop abortion, what will really stop it is providing sexual education to Moroccan men and women in a certain age”; she added, “abortion should be allowed when the woman is not physically, financially or emotionally able to have a new born. Motherhood should never be forced, it should always be chosen.”

The debate over abortion was renewed in Morocco, in 2015, when King Mohammed VI intervened and ordered a committee composed of the Minister of Justice and Freedoms, the Minister of Endowments and Islamic Affairs and the President of the National Council for Human Rights to launch consultations, with the aim of reviewing the laws governing for abortion in the Kingdom.

After two months of discussion, the committee concluded that abortion is permitted in the following cases: when pregnancy poses a threat to the mother’s life, pregnancy resulting from rape and incest, and if doctors note the presence of serious congenital malformations and difficult diseases that threaten the fetus. The ball passed to the parliament, but no legislative decisions have been made yet.

“We celebrated the decision, in 2015, “with drums and flutes”, just to get disappointed again. Here we are after more than 5 years, with nothing concrete about the legalization of abortion.”

Violence and harassment: laws and loopholes

Moroccan women now have protections against male guardian requirements, rape-marriage allowances and sexual harassment. The government passed all of these laws after 2004, with one as recent as 2018. Yet, there are still loopholes in the legal system.

In 2020, 16,590 cases of violence against women have been registered in Morocco, according to a report by the Royal Gendarmerie. The recorded cases concern 16,947 victims, including 1,106 minors.

Between assault and battery, forcible confinement, homicide, attempted homicide and domestic physical violence, the number of physical violence cases stands at 7,916 compared to 8,358 in 2019.

Domestic physical violence alone amounts to 1,786 cases, rape accounts for 30.31% (308 cases) of the total cases of sexual violence. In addition, 7,013 cases of psychic violence were divided between neglect, refusal to register a birth, threats and insults.

Femicide has increased by 31.6%, in Morocco, during periods of confinement and health emergency, compared to the same period of the year 2019, according to figures provided by the Federation of Women’s Rights Leagues.

Ghizlane Mamouni explained, “it’s true that Morocco has amended many laws to protect women from violence and harassment, however these amendments cannot be truly executed due to many odds.”

The women’s rights and individual rights’ militant added, “Moroccan police is not provided by the professional skills to deal with harassment and violence cases, many times they refuse women’s accusations by saying “go back to you house, unless there’s blood then come back. They don’t think that abuse is a serious matter.”

Mamouni added that sexual abuse is hard to prove legally, but when it’s proven, the sexually abused woman needs to answer questions such: what were you doing with him? Have you been in a sexual relationship with him? And if the answer is yes she will most likely go to jail regardless of the emotional and physical harm that she experienced.”

Individual rights: women are the first victim of article 490

Lawyer Ghizlane Mamouni, used the previous example to highlight the solid relationship between women’s rights and individual rights.

The article of law 409 punishes “with imprisonment from one month to one year, all persons of the different sex who, not being united by the bonds of marriage, have sexual relations with each other”.
“Even that the article concerns both sex, women are always the first victim in the case of sexual abuse, violence, pregnancy, and porn-revenge as the case of Hanae”

The case of Hanae started when an intimate video of her was posted on social media without her knowledge. The young single mother of two, from Tetouan, found herself under the jurisdiction of Article 490 of the Moroccan penal code, which criminalizes relations outside marriage. The perpetrator, who is responsible for the dissemination of the video and currently resides in the Netherlands, is also under an international arrest warrant, but no judgment has been pronounced against those who participated in the dissemination of the video online.

Mamouni explained: “the problem is that we have in Morocco a law that prohibits sharing individuals’ personal content without their knowledge”, another contradiction targets Moroccan woman to become the double victim of abuse and of the judicial system.

On 23 September 2019, a manifesto titled by “We, Moroccan citizens, declare that we are outlaws,” encouraged Moroccans to commit to its cause: to sign a petition to abolish Article 490 of the penal code that punishes sexual intercourse outside of wedlock. 490 women signed the petition almost immediately and publicly declared that they were “violating” the laws 490 and 491. Today, this number has reached 15,000. And so, the Moroccan women’s movement, Collective 490, was born.

The event that triggered the movement was accusing Moroccan journalist Hajar Raissouni of abortion after arresting her and her partner Rifaat al-Amin as they were leaving a gynaecologist’s office in Rabat.
Ghizlane Mamouni, a lawyer, who is a person keen to apply the law, belongs proudly to a movement that incite Moroccans to be outlaws, a contradiction that Mamouni explained during her interview with Hespress Eng.

“Law is an important plea to lift the society and contributes in its development therefore it shouldn’t be built on injustice. We all went outlaws when Raissouni was arrested over abortion accuses.”Mamouni added later that the name was to protest these injustices and shouldn’t be taken literally.

Mamouni ended her statements about individual rights by, “I wish that Moroccan polices offices and courts use the financial budget directed towards arresting and trialing two young people holding hands towards much serious matters as corruption and drugs traffic.”

Women’s political presence

Political Moroccan history shows that few women enter parliament without benefiting from the “quota” mechanism that has been in place in Morocco for nearly two decades. It is noted that most parties are betting on names that are guaranteed to win from election specialists.

Political parties are betting on potentially winning names, such as male deputies who are supported at the local level and who are already firmly established with the population.

No woman has been pushed to head regional or municipal councils in major cities in the past years. Moroccans had to wait until 2019 to elect the first female region’s president Ambarka Bouaida as president of the Guelmim-Oued Noun region, after Abdel Rahim Ben Bouaida resignation.

Thanks to the new electoral procedures, it is expected that the number of women in elected councils will increase significantly, as the new electoral amendment in Morocco established new mechanisms to ensure the representation of women by granting them a third of the seats in all prefectures or regions councils And add the number to the seats allocated to them in the municipal councils.

Mamouni is convinced that the pale women’s presence in the parliament stands behind the continuity of injustices towards Moroccan women. However she argued that having women representatives in the legislatives institutions is not enough, “I remember reading Nouzha Guessous’ book “In the country of Fokahae”, in the last chapters she talked about her experience in the Royal Advisory Commission responsible for revising the Family Code (2001-2004) and how she was silenced and interrupted by religious’ men in the committee. What I am trying to say is women shouldn’t be elected just as a hallow representation of female political presence. They should be given real responsibilities.”