Resources: Occasional Papers

This Occasional Paper features recent activities of Act Together, one of WLUML's networking organisations based in the UK. In July 2006 Act Together, Women's Action for Iraq, hosted Sundus Abass, Director of Women in Leadership Institute (Baghdad) in London for 15 days. WLUML helped to make the visit possible, as part of various network activities in support of women in post-conflict situations, such as in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka. This publication is a record of some of the activities that happened during those 15 hectic days. The aim of the visit was to highlight the work that Iraqi women are doing to try to amend the new Iraqi Constitution, in particular to ensure that the pre-existing Iraqi Personal Status Law, one of the more egalitarian family laws in the Middle East, is not replaced by Article 41.

A Roundtable on Strategies to Address ‘Honour Crimes’ was held in London from 12-13 November 1999. It was jointly organised by the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law (CIMEL) at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University and by INTERIGHTS, the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, under the auspices of the CIMEL/INTERIGHTS ‘Honour Crimes’ Project.

The dilemma of the Iranian regime in dealing with one of its very successful large scale public mobilizations in the seemingly innocuous activity of low-income women delivering basic health and family planning information.

There is a tendency in the West to exaggerate the gap between the evolution of Western family laws and the evolution of family laws in Muslim countries. By comparing the changes in the legal definitions of marriage and the relationship of the spouses in French law, the secular laws of Turkey, and the laws of North African countries, this article reveals similar patterns in legal evolution on the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean.