Karzai to review controversial women's law

Afghan President Hamid Karzai today said a new law which critics claimed made it legal for men to rape their wives would be studied and possibly sent back to parliament for review if women’s rights were violated.

Mr Karzai said he had ordered the Justice Ministry to review the law and if anything in it contravened the country’s constitution or sharia law “measures will be taken”.

The legislation is intended to regulate family life inside Afghanistan’s shiite community. But the United Nations Development Fund for Women said it “legalises the rape of a wife by her husband”.

The United States has urged Karzai to review the law and Mr Karzai said he had spoken to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about it.

One of the law’s most controversial articles stipulates the wife “is bound to preen for her husband as and when he desires”.

“As long as the husband is not travelling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night,” Article 132 of the law says.

“Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband.”

One provision also appears to protect the woman’s right to sex inside marriage saying the “man should not avoid having sexual relations with his wife longer than once every four months”.

Critics say Mr Karzai signed the legislation in the past month only for political gains several months before the country’s presidential election.

Brad Adams, the Asia director for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the law was a “dramatic setback for women’s rights”.

“It directly contradicts the freedoms enshrined in the Afghan constitution and the international conventions that Afghanistan has signed up to that guarantee the rights of women,” Mr Adams said.

Safia Sidiqi, an MP from Nangarhar province who condemned the legislation, said she could not remember parliament debating or even voting on the law and she did not know how it came to be signed by Karzai. She called for the law to be recalled to parliament for debate.

“It is impossible in a two-month session for parliament to pass a law more than 200 pages long,” she said of the 263-page law.

Sayed Hossain Alemi Balkhi, a shiite MP involved in drafting it, defended the legislation, saying it gave more rights to women than even Britain or the US.

He said the law made women safer and ensured the husband was obliged to provide for her.