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Resources: North Africa

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26/1/2010
Legal Empowerment of Unwed Mothers: Experiences of Moroccan NGOs

This paper by Stephanie Willman Bordat and Saida Kouzzi is part of the IDLO book series Lessons Learned: Narrative Accounts of Legal Reform in Developing and Transition Countries. The term “unwed mother” is used here to refer to women who have children outside the framework of legal marriage. They and their children – defined by law as “illegitimate” – are among the most legally and socially marginalized people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, not just in Morocco.

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27/10/2009
2004 Moroccan Family Law (Moudawana)

This unofficial English translation of the 2004 Moroccan Family Law (Moudawana) was prepared by a team of English and Arabic speaking lawyers at the Global Rights head office in Washington D.C. and their field office in Rabat, and a professional Arabic-English Moroccan translator.

26/10/2009
Bound and Gagged by the Algerian Family Code

Marieme Hélie-Lucas, writing in 1989, talks about an alarming change in the situation of women in Algeria. A ‘Family Code’ law was introduced which removed many of women’s basic human rights. She also speaks about contraception, the problem of abandoned children and the consequences for women of the insistence on virginity at marriage.

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26/10/2009
Algerian women, citizenship and the 'Family Code'

This article traces Algerian women's struggle for full citizenship after the national liberation struggle ended in 1962. The Algerian Family Code, which became law in 1984, defines women as minors under the law and as existing only in so far as they are daughters, mothers or wives.

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26/10/2009
Algeria: 20 Years is Enough

In 2003, the '20 ans Barakat' campaign was initiated by the association of the same name. The aim of the Campaign was to inform and raise awareness among the people in general and women in particular about the Algerian Family Code (personal status laws).

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6/2/2006
The Harvest: Two Years After Khol - An Analytical Study

Egyptian women's experience of new khol provisions, as discussed in this book, act not only as a future warning for those seeking to expand women's access to divorce in other Muslim contexts. It also confirms what legal rights activists in Pakistan have known for many years since case law firmly established khol as a right available to the wife without the husband's permission in 1967.

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26/1/2004
One Hundred Steps: Codification of Family and Personal Status Laws in the Maghreb

Outlines proposed egalitarian family and personal status laws in the Maghreb and presents a synthesis of thematic reports jointly produced by a number of researchers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

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30/7/2003
CEDAW Shadow Report on Algeria

Submitted to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), this Shadow Report focuses on one of the central obstacles to women’s equality and advancement: the rise and ongoing threat of politicised, violent religious fundamentalism and its project to impose its particular view of Islam through the theocratization of the State and/or through violence and terror.

30/1/2003
Dossier 14-15: Women's Rights Activist Assassinated in Algeria
February 17, 1995

Human Rights Watch's Women's Rights Project and Middle East division today deplored the assassination by suspected Islamist militants of Algerian women's rights activist Nabila Djahnine. Ms. Djahnine, a thirty-year-old architect who led an organization called the Cry of Women, was killed on February 15 in Tizi Ouzou, the capital city of the Kabyle region. According to a February 16 El-Watan report, she was gunned down by two men in a car as she walked to work.
30/1/2003
Dossier 14-15: Gender, Civil Society and Citizenship in Algeria
Women in Algeria must negotiate their access to the public sphere in a society torn between the residual patriarchal reflexes of the modern state and Islamist revivalism.