Alwaght- Less than a year to end of the legal term of the parliament and while precise date for the next year elections is not yet set, the Iraqi members of parliament these days are taking steps towards an important law that not only can make the current period a golden one for settling the internal differences and localizing the structure of customary laws in Iraq after 2003, but also highly influence the next year elections.
The agenda of the Sunday session of the Iraqi parliament was voting on three important laws: Personal Status Law, General Amnesty Law, and Land Restitution Law.
Although these three draft laws deal with completely different issues, they appear to be the result of a broad agreement among the main parliamentary factions, including Shiites Shiite Coordination Framework (SCF), the Sunnis, and the Kurds, which made presenting all three plans in parliament at once necessary and interdependent.
The most important draft law that sparked widespread controversy in parliament and among civil society organizations, between supporters and opponents, was the proposal to amend Iraq's Personal Status Law No. 188 of 1959, which was presented by the SCF.
Personal Status Law is a set of legal rules that regulate the relationships between individuals in terms of lineage, marriage and kinship, birth, guardianship, custody, mutual rights and obligations, and other matters. Reforming this law may lead to changes in the rights of alimony, custody, inheritance, and will.
According to Iraqi media reports, the main disputes surrounding the reform of the Personal Status Law are the issues of the age of marriage for females, registration of marriage in judicial courts, the legal authority for marriage, the rights of divorced women, and the custody of children.
Iraq's Personal Status Law was amended 17 times until 1999, but has not been amended in the past 25 years.
The current amendment allows Iraqis to follow religious rulings (based on their religion) in handling personal status matters. According to the proposed amendment, the Shia Ja'fari school of thought for Shiites and the Hanafi school of thought for Sunnis would be included in Iraq's Personal Status Law.
Meanwhile, alongside the broad support for these reforms in parliament and among the public, there have also been protests and criticisms of these reforms in the media, especially among supporters of the secular nature of the Iraqi legal system.
For example, critics object that the amendment does not address the issue of marriage between men and women of different sects, and if a husband is Sunni and a wife is Shia, it is unclear what the solution is in terms of inheritance distribution, divorce, and child custody.
Supporters of the law reform, however, argue these problems can be resolved by referring to Shia and Sunni jurists and do not object to the overall benefits of the draft law, and that it is legitimate based on Article 41 of the Iraqi Constitution, which states that “all Iraqis are free to adhere to their personal circumstances, based on their religions and beliefs.”
Saadoun Montadhar, a member of the Islamic Dawa Party and a supporter of the law reform, explained the reason for this by stating that “75 percent of the current MPs support voting to amend the law,” adding: “The proposed amendment does not contradict Article 41 of the Constitution, which recognizes the rights of every religion and sect.”
He said: "We have many problems in Iraq regarding marriage, divorce and child custody, and this amendment will solve these problems."
Supporters of the draft bills also believe that reforming the Personal Status Law will not only not lead to an increase in divorces, but also they can also witness a decrease in the divorce rate after the law is amended.
Untying the parliamentary twists with election of al-Mashhadani as parliament speaker
As mentioned, the Personal Status Law and two important drafts related to general amnesty and the return of real estate were supported by the majority of MPs, which should be seen as positive results in resolving the stalemate over the election of the new speaker of parliament, in facilitating the legislative process and easing the differences among political factions in the general political atmosphere of the country.
In this regard, it should be noted that the Personal Status Law reform draft bill was initially presented in July 2024 by Raed al-Rakabi, a Shiite parliamentarian. In this relatively long period of time, the most important development has been related to resolving the issue of electing the new speaker of parliament, which led to the election of Mahmoud al-Mashhadani with the cooperation of Sunni factions within the SCF.
Iraq's parliament was without a speaker for a year since November 2023, when former speaker Muhammad al-Halbousi was forced to resign on charges of fraud. Finally, on Thursday, October 31, the MPs voted with 182 votes to elect al-Mashhadani as the new speaker of the House of Representatives.
Political factions insisted on resolving the crisis regarding the speaker position before the New Year holidays, and after electing al-Mashhadani, the parliament voted to extend its legislative work by one month.
In his first speech after taking office, al-Mashhadani pledged to remove legislative obstacles and oversee the government's performance.
Big agreement; competition of the SCF and Sadrist Movement
Overwhelming support to the Personal Status Law, after deep differences which made it unaccessible, is part of a broad agreement according to which the the factions with the vote of the MPs to the triple bill have resolved thir differences.
On one side of this agreement stand a number of Sunni parties that have agreed with Shiite forces to approve an amendment to the Personal Status Law in exchange for the approval of the draft Amnesty Law.
The Amnesty Law has been one of the most prominent demands of Sunni parties in Iraq since 2003. According to non-governmental organizations, government forces have detained thousands of Sunni Arabs without legal evidence or pretext and under the cover of fighting terrorism.
Until now, the main disagreement have been over Article 4 of the draft amendment to the Amnesty Law related to the definition of affiliation with terrorist organizations, the second draft of which was submitted to parliament by Sunni parties in September 2022 during the formation of the Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani's government, and has remained unresolved until now.
The Kurds have also secured part of this agreement to themselves and the legislative package, which concerns the adoption of the Land Restitution Law, which they are demanding.
According to this law, real estate and farming lands that were seized in 1975 during the Saddam rule will be returned to the affected people, especially Kurds, Turkmens, and Christians. In addition, a registration system is intended to ensure that violations do not occur in the future, to establish effective mechanisms for implementing decisions related to property restitution and compensation, to help implement the law fairly and effectively, and to promote social and economic stability in these areas.
These lands are mainly located in disputed Kirkuk province, where there is disagreement over its federal administration between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government in the north.
This legal trade-off, given the great importance of the laws proposed in this agreement package for each of the three Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish alliances, can certainly be decisive in increasing the political motivations of current factions to continue this partnership and maintain this achievement in the parliament and the future government.
This is significant because, as the public debate about setting the date of parliamentary elections next year approaches, the Sadrist Movement is likely to make a comeback to the political scene, and in that case, competition between the SCF and the Sadrists to form the future cabinet is not unlikely.
Meanwhile, some have seen the success of the SCF in passing the Personal Status Law reform bill within the framework of a competition with the Sadrist Movement.
In May 2024, Sadrist Movement's head Muqtada al-Sadr called for the Shiite Eid al-Ghadir holiday to be included in the country's official calendar, and the acceptance of this proposal by the cabinet represented a significant success in the eyes of his supporters among Iraqi Shiites, which was able to further highlight al-Sadr's personality and religious status.
Meanwhile, some believe that removing the obstacles ahead of the Personal Status Law, given its important influence on the change of nature of a considerable part of customary laws from the secular to religious and local form, will draw support from the clergy, religious schools, and religious public and help boost the SCF relations with Najaf clergy and bolster its position in the future parliamentary elections.
