{"id":34803,"date":"2019-03-09T02:23:33","date_gmt":"2019-03-09T02:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=34803"},"modified":"2019-03-09T02:23:33","modified_gmt":"2019-03-09T02:23:33","slug":"tunisia-divided-over-equal-inheritance-for-women-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=34803","title":{"rendered":"Tunisia divided over equal inheritance for women"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nKASSERINE\/TUNISIA: Souad Gharsalli lives in a rented flat in the center of Kasserine, in western Tunisia, baking and selling artisanal bread to make money. But she should be growing olive trees for a living, she says.<\/p>\n

\nGharsalli, 47, grew up with three brothers and six sisters on her family\u2019s 7 hectares (17 acres) of land in the region of Kasserine, on which they grew olive trees and grains.<\/p>\n

\nWhen their father died in 1997, Gharsalli and her sisters inherited half as much land as their brothers, in accordance with Tunisian law.<\/p>\n

\nThen one of the brothers asked his sisters to sign a document. The women, who are only partially literate, later found out they had given up any claim to their father\u2019s land.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe thought we were just giving them the right to work on our land,\u201d Gharsalli told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. \u201cBut after that, we had no right to any of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nDespite laws protecting their right to inherit, many women in Tunisia struggle to get their allocated share. According to government figures from 2014 \u2014 the latest available \u2014 in 85 percent of cases women got no land at all when their fathers died.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"Now, a proposed new law could give women and men an equal share of inheritance.<\/p>\n

\nThe proposal, due to be debated by Parliament, has divided opinion across Tunisia, as well as other parts of North Africa and the Middle East.<\/p>\n

\nSupporters say the law, which was presented to the country\u2019s legislature in February, could give Tunisian women greater financial autonomy. Government figures show that less than five percent of women in Tunisia are registered land owners.<\/p>\n

\nNational polls show almost 60 percent of women in Tunisia are against the proposal, however, as it seeks to replace legislation that is based on Islamic law.<\/p>\n

\nAfter opposition from conservatives, the original draft law was amended to allow individuals to \u201copt out\u201d and continue to allocate inheritance according to the current rules.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThis will be the first Arab country that will have legislated on this question, which is sensitive and taboo because it is said to be written in the religious texts,\u201d said Khadija Cherif, coordinator of the commission on inheritance at the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD).<\/p>\n

\n\u201cBut (for me) this is not a question of religion. It is a question of economic power, which gives men power in the family and over the women.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\u2018You will get land\u00a0from your husbands\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

\nAdvocates of the proposal know that even if the text is passed into law, social pressure and informal family arrangements could still block women\u2019s access to land.<\/p>\n

\nBefore Hayet Nasri\u2019s father died, he told his family he would leave his 14 hectares of land to only one of his four sons.<\/p>\n

\nAfter their father\u2019s death, the brothers instead agreed to share the land between them. Now they have 200 olive trees each, and Nasri and her five sisters have none.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe sharing of the land is not legal, it is not official. It\u2019s done within the family, not the court,\u201d said Nasri, who rents a house in Kasserine with her husband and five children.<\/p>\n

\nTo justify their actions, her brothers told her and her sisters: \u201cYou are married. You will get land from your husbands, not from us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nBut if all the land a woman has is from her husband, a divorce can leave her with nothing, said Ahmed Mbarki, a lawyer in Kasserine.<\/p>\n

\nTunisian divorce law provides for an equal split of property acquired during the marriage, but that applies only to residences, not land. Even so, \u201cthe husband will try to get around it,\u201d said Mbarki.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe land is always in the hands of the man, the husband, the father. If there is a divorce \u2014 and there are many \u2014 the husband gives nothing to his wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nMbarki has also seen many inheritance cases where women willingly give up their rights to a portion of their fathers\u2019 land.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe sisters say, \u2018I love my brother, I want to give them my part, I don\u2019t want to cause any problems,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\nFirst steps<\/strong><\/p>\n

\nCherif of the ATFD \u2014 which has been leading the campaign for the new law \u2014 sees the proposed law, and the debate surrounding it, as promising \u201cfirst steps\u201d toward change.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThere is a lot of silence around injustice against women,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIt (the law) will allow those who think in silence that their situation is unjust to defend themselves, and it will allow others to become conscious of the fact that they have and can use this right. That will take time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nShe added that the ATFD is seeing more women fighting for their inheritance rights in court today compared to 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

\nGharsalli is still waiting. After divorcing her husband in 1998, she did not re-marry and now lives with her son.<\/p>\n

\nLast year, her brothers promised to give her a plot of land but later changed their minds.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cMy wish is to get the chance to own some part of this land to plant even just 20 olive trees to live off of,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KASSERINE\/TUNISIA: Souad Gharsalli lives in a rented flat in the center of Kasserine, in western Tunisia, baking and selling artisanal bread to make money. But she should be growing olive trees for a living, she says. Gharsalli, 47, grew up with three brothers and six sisters on her family\u2019s 7 hectares (17 acres) of land…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}