Family law

Farima Samake, a widow living in the village of Gwelekoro in the south of

The NGOs signing below express their worry and extreme anger from the Personal Status Law decree project that counselor Abdallah El Baga, president of the Family Appeal Court, presented under title "number 25 January" for year 2011 to Prime Minister, Essam Sharaf. The project includes 7 articles, where El Baga demands in the first one, the cancellation of (El Khol'), and in the third article he demands that a mother's custody would end when the male child reaches 7 years old and female child reaches 10 years old. In article four he demands, that the father has sole educational guardianship and in case that the foster mother is inflicted she should go to court. In article five, he talks about enforcing wife obedience by coercive force in case that the wife doesn't object to the warning in time, or that a finale verdict has been issued in addition to the cessation of her alimony till she is back to obedience.

The controversial Family Protection bill was dealt a blow at the Islamic parliament today as one of its articles outlining legal registration of "temporary marriages" was voted down. ILNA reports that Article 21 of the new bill failed to pass through the parliament with only 45 votes in favour of it. The article was one of the points women’s rights activists objected to in the so-called Family Protection bill.

The Protection Project at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, in cooperation with the Alexandria University Faculty of Law in Alexandria, Egypt, will be hosting a conference on “Women’s Rights in Egypt and Arab States,” which will take place December 1 – 2, 2010 at the Helnan Palestine Hotel in Alexandria, Egypt. The conference will bring together professors of law, religion and social sciences and representatives from NGOs and other elements of civil society to discuss a broad array of topics related to the rights of women in the Arab world, including Islamic law, personal status and family laws, and labor and political rights, among others.