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Afghanistan: New law will allow men to attack wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment

Feb 9, 2014 4:35 pm By Robert Spencer

Karzai demands US focus on peace process before signing pact

Why should a man who strikes a disobedient woman be subjected to judicial punishment? The justification for his being harsh with such a woman is in the Qur’an itself: “Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God’s guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them.” (Qur’an 4:34)

“New Afghanistan law to silence victims of violence against women,” by Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian, February 4 (thanks to Lookmann):

A new Afghan law will allow men to attack their wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country blighted by so-called “honour” killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse.

The small but significant change to Afghanistan’s criminal prosecution code bans relatives of an accused person from testifying against them. Most violence against women in Afghanistan is within the family, so the law – passed by parliament but awaiting the signature of the president, Hamid Karzai – will effectively silence victims as well as most potential witnesses to their suffering.

“It is a travesty this is happening,” said Manizha Naderi, director of the charity and campaign group Women for Afghan Women. “It will make it impossible to prosecute cases of violence against women … The most vulnerable people won’t get justice now.”

Under the new law, prosecutors could never come to court with cases like that of Sahar Gul, a child bride whose in-laws chained her in a basement and starved, burned and whipped her when she refused to work as a prostitute for them. Women like 31-year-old Sitara, whose nose and lips were sliced off by her husband at the end of last year, could never take the stand against their attackers.

“Honour” killings by fathers and brothers who disapprove of a woman’s behaviour would be almost impossible to punish. Forced marriage and the sale or trading of daughters to end feuds or settle debt would also be largely beyond the control of the law in a country where the prosecution of abuse is already rare.

It is common in western legal systems to excuse people from testimony that might incriminate their spouse. But it is a very narrow exception, with little resemblance to the blanket ban planned in Afghanistan….

The change is in a section of the criminal code titled “Prohibition of Questioning an Individual as a Witness”. Others covered by the ban are children, doctors and defence lawyers for the accused….

As most Afghans live in walled compounds, shared only with their extended families, this covers most witnesses to violence in the home.

The bill has been sent to Karzai, who must decide whether to sign it into force. After failing to block the change in parliament, campaigners plan to throw their weight behind shaming the president into suspending the new law.

“We will ask the president not to sign until the article is changed, we will put a lot of pressure on him,” said Selay Ghaffar, director of the shelter and advocacy group Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan. She said activists hoped to repeat the success of a campaign in 2009 that forced Karzai to soften a family law enshrining marital rape as a husband’s right.

But that was five years ago, and since then Karzai has presided over a strengthening of conservative forces. In the last year alone parliament has blocked a law to curb violence against women and cut the quota for women on provincial councils, while the justice ministry floated a proposal to bring back stoning as a punishment for adultery….

“In the beginning they were a little scared with the new government and media,” Ghaffar said, referring to the period soon after the Taliban’s fall when women’s rights were a focus of international attention. “Now they do whatever they want as they have seen the government is not very democratic or strongly in favour of women’s rights.”…

Countries that spent billions trying to improve justice and human rights are now focused largely on security, and are retreating from Afghan politics….

They didn’t actually spend billions trying to improve justice and human rights. If they had intended to improve justice and human rights, they would never have drafted a constitution for Afghanistan that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land. But to have stood against that would have entailed a clear recognition of how Sharia contradicts otherwise universally accepted understandings of human rights, and that would have been “Islamophobic.”

In other words, the Western powers did not work to improve justice and human rights in Afghanistan because they were unwilling to acknowledge the truth about Islamic law.

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Filed Under: Afghanistan, Sharia, women's rights in Islam Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. tpellow says

    Feb 9, 2014 at 4:49 pm

    What’s Obama’s irresponsible political line on this?

    Either- (a) ‘I didn’t see it coming’;

    or- (b) ‘I won’t mention it,’

    or- (c) ‘I welcome the imposition of Sharia law’.

    • glicko says

      Feb 10, 2014 at 6:40 am

      tpellow….obviously your havent heard about the multi millions of dollars that the USA is going to give to Afghanistan to “help them along”……why does our federal government think that they can BUY friendships throughout the world? Countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan and others take our tax dollars and simply laugh at our stupidity as they plot new ways to kill Americans and their allies.

    • Fitz Kohlhaas says

      Feb 23, 2014 at 2:14 pm

      All of the above!

  2. Matthew says

    Feb 9, 2014 at 7:43 pm

    These people belong in the stone age.

    • Lookmann says

      Feb 9, 2014 at 9:45 pm

      And surely they would protest against being equated with Islam.

      • Lookmann says

        Feb 9, 2014 at 9:49 pm

        ‘And surely they would protest against being equated with Islam.’

        This is meant to be

        And surely they (the stone age people) would protest against being equated with Islam.

        • dumbledoresarmy says

          Feb 10, 2014 at 5:12 pm

          Yes. After all: stone-age people made music (35 000 year old bone flutes have been found; Islam explicitly curses *flutes* and strings), painted or engraved pictures representing humans and animals and spirit-beings (the grotto of Chauvet) and kept pet dogs. All those things are criminalised by Islam. (There are even archaeological sites that show that long, long before the invention of Islam ancient humans on the Arabian peninsula did quite beautiful rock-engravings depicting animals and humans).

    • AnnaS says

      Feb 10, 2014 at 1:10 am

      And so crazy and deluded they refer to themselves as ” superior” . Worse, seemingly many of our Western leaders are in agreement.?! Lick their boots all day long ” pleeze take us over oh enlightened ones” aaargh
      The world has gone insane, like never before.

    • glicko says

      Feb 10, 2014 at 6:42 am

      these people ARE living in the stone age and that’s where they belong…..their actions only attest to that fact…..

    • Shane says

      Feb 10, 2014 at 11:14 am

      Actually, they belong in the 7th century when Muhammad created Islam and enshrined the oppression of women in the Koran. Libs deny this as Muslims are their allies against Christianity and the West.

    • Murphy says

      Feb 11, 2014 at 3:34 pm

      Dude, they are in the stone age.

  3. gravenimage says

    Feb 9, 2014 at 7:48 pm

    Afghanistan: New law will allow men to attack wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment
    ………………………………

    And we can expect silence from those who say that wife-beating, child abuse, and “Honor Killings” have nothing to do with Islam…

    And here Afghanistan takes another step backward, without even waiting for the Taliban to retake power.

    Aren’t you glad we wasted so much blood and treasure “liberating” Afghanistan? sarc/off

  4. Salah says

    Feb 9, 2014 at 9:45 pm

    “The small but significant change to Afghanistan’s criminal prosecution code bans relatives of an accused person from testifying against them.”

    Does this mean that women can beat their disobedient (or sexually impotent) husbands without fear of judicial punishment? just asking!

    “Innocence of Muslims” video clip mn. 12:50 depicts Muhammad’s wives beating him. Best scene ever!

    http://crossmuslims.blogspot.ca/2012/10/innocence-of-muslims-dissected.html

  5. fair_dinkum says

    Feb 9, 2014 at 9:54 pm

    its such a peaceful, loving religion.. so quaint.

    sarc.

    well it wont change much. its just confirming in law that the “men” in this miserable country, afghanistan, can carry on as usual.

    islan does not lend itself to any form of womens’ rights. on the contrary. it denounces, degrades and seriously threatens women, enslaving and abusing them to madness or death.. or both.

    the rates of clinical depression, bpd, anxiety, despair, frustration, fear and loneliness must be every day burdens to women in islam. marital rape, torture, and of course, the subject at hand, beatings and other violence, physical and psychological..

    • dumbledoresarmy says

      Feb 10, 2014 at 6:16 pm

      Not to mention depression, rickets, and assorted other illnesses caused by vitamin D deficiency because of having to wear the burqa all day long and never getting any exposure to sunlight. Furthermore, if a woman is severely Vitamin D deficient during pregnancy, the baby is predisposed to develop…schizophrenia when it grows up.

      • Lookmann says

        Feb 11, 2014 at 10:38 am

        ‘Furthermore, if a woman is severely Vitamin D deficient during pregnancy, the baby is predisposed to develop…schizophrenia when it grows up’

        Well, Well, now you can understand why ‘ committed’ muslims behave like zombies/ brain-dead.

  6. JamesonRocks says

    Feb 9, 2014 at 10:08 pm

    I will be so happy when our troops finally leave this stone age cesspool!

  7. Defcon 4 says

    Feb 9, 2014 at 10:32 pm

    I’m sure Anderson Cooper, BS O’Reilly, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow will be right on this story, like white on rice. They’ll make sure the public knows!

  8. Infidela says

    Feb 10, 2014 at 2:25 am

    Unless a country is a secular democracy, where people are free to believe in any religion or none at all, then such a country isn’t a genuine democracy. The US allowed Afghanistan to have sharia law, which means that the Taliban have already won.

  9. duh_swami says

    Feb 10, 2014 at 5:23 am

    Civilized countries discourage domestic violence and will punish a perpetrator. But then, Islamic controlled countries are not that civilized.
    The Quran itself is not that civilized. Why are US dollars going to support this harmful and backward place?

  10. Cindy Mccoy says

    Feb 10, 2014 at 7:45 am

    These folks are so barbaric, you would think every woman in that country would be trying to escape that hell hole of a region. You want to get a small glimpse of hell, just look at the Middle East. These people are talking like stone-age people, stoning women who they deem have committed a crime. I don’t understand these women either, they raise their sons to be this way and their daughters to submit to that. Just sounds crazy to me.

  11. Veracious_one says

    Feb 10, 2014 at 9:02 am

    Afghanistan: New law will allow men to attack wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment

    what’s new about it? in Islam it’s always been allowed…

  12. doreva says

    Feb 10, 2014 at 12:29 pm

    obviously the lawmakers in Afghanistan are islamophobes!

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