After six months of consultations, a first version of the text was submitted to the king. The ban on the marriage of minors is demanded by associations and several political parties.
The project to reform the Moudawana, the family code in Morocco, has entered its final phase. After six months of hearings, the commission responsible for its revision sent, on March 30, a first version of the text to the head of government, Aziz Akhannouch, who handed it over to King Mohammed VI. It is now up to the sovereign, who is also the Commander of the Faithful, to arbitrate this proposal, ensuring a balance “between the desire for modernity and religious constraints”, warns a member of the majority. The bill will then be put to a vote in Parliament, « before the end of the spring session » in July, says the leader of an opposition party.
Whatever the content of the reform, its ratification is beyond doubt: the previous overhaul of the family code, in 2004, was adopted unanimously by both chambers, marking the beginning of an improvement in the rights of Moroccan women. But twenty years later, “it is clear that its provisions are obsolete,” assure Nouzha Chekrouni and Abdessalam Saad Jaldi, of the Moroccan think tank Policy Center for the New South. The researchers point to a legal corpus under “the influence of patriarchal subjectivities”, the profound transformations of Moroccan society further magnifying the “insufficiency” of the text.
