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Two more ’punitive’ actions against women have taken place in less than one month in the southern city of M’sila, Algeria (night of June 11 and July 2-3, 2011). Their houses were burnt down by hundreds of youth, and they barely escaped being lynched. The police did not intervene. This is not the first time similar events take place (see background information below). Since the 80s, there were not just attacks on individual women but real pogroms against working women, living with or without their children, but definitely without the male guardians (wali) that the Family Code still prescribes for women. Sign the petition here.

Like every other citizen of Oslo, I have walked in the streets and buildings that have been blown away. I have even spent time on the island where young political activists were massacred. I share the fear and pain of my country. But the question is always why, and this violence was not blind. The terror of Norway has not come from Islamic extremists. Nor has it come from the far left, even though both these groups have been accused time after time of being the inner threat to our "way of living". Up to and including the terrifying hours in the afternoon of 22 July, the little terror my country has experienced has come from the far right.

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 establishment of the Republic of South Sudan came with high hopes that it might improve the lives of women there. But women’s rights activists in the country left behind–the mostly Muslim Sudan–are bracing for a battle against an escalation of Islamic fundamentalist law. Following South Sudan’s independence, its neighbor to the north, Sudan, is left in the hands of the widely-acknowledged-to-be-corruptNational Congress Party. President Omar al-Bashir, who took power in a 1989 military coup, was criticized for introducing Sharia law (based upon patriarchal interpretations of the Koran) in 1991, in a move that was opposed by the country’s Christian and Animist population.