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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Today, in Algeria, the execution
and murder of women, foreigners and intellectuals by Muslim extremists have
become systematic. Such typically fascist acts have given rise to feelings of
outrage. Logically, therefore, one would expect that the most lucid would rally
around a struggle against such a political vision or, at the very least, in
defense of the memory of the victims.