New Afghan law allows beating women

PanARMENIAN.Net - 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 "honor" killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse, the Guardian reports.

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.

"Honor" killings by fathers and brothers who disapprove of a woman's behavior 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.

Human Rights Watch said it would "let batterers of women and girls off the hook".

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 defense lawyers for the accused.

Senators originally wanted a milder version of the law that would prevent relatives from being legally obliged to take the stand in a case in which they did not want to testify.But both houses of parliament eventually passed a draft banning all testimony, according to the Guardian.

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.