[DEBATE] : Pressure on Hamid Karzai to scrap Afghan women's law

[Riaz K Tayob]

[Yes real pressure on the Mayor of Kabul... just like bringing democracy 
to Iraq...]

Pressure on Hamid Karzai to scrap Afghan women's law

    * Julian Borger in The Hague
    * The Guardian, Wednesday 1 April 2009
    * Article history

Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, came under intense western 
pressure yesterday to scrap a new law that the UN said legalised rape 
within marriage and severely limited the rights of women.

At a conference on Afghanistan in The Hague, Scandinavian foreign 
ministers publicly challenged the Afghan leader to respond to a report 
on the new law in yesterday's Guardian, and the US secretary of state, 
Hillary Clinton, was reported to have confronted Karzai on the issue in 
a private meeting.

At a press conference after the meeting, Clinton made clear US 
displeasure at the apparent backsliding on women's rights. "This is an 
area of absolute concern for the United States. My message is very 
clear. Women's rights are a central part of the foreign policy of the 
Obama administration," she said.

The Guardian reported that Karzai had signed the controversial law last 
month. The text has not yet been published but the UN, human rights 
activists and some Afghan MPs said it included clauses stipulating that 
women cannot refuse to have sex with their husbands, and can only seek 
work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands' permission.

International aid officials say the law violates both UN conventions and 
the Afghan constitution. It is widely seen as a political ploy by Karzai 
to win support from conservative Muslims in presidential elections 
scheduled for August.

Mark Malloch Brown, Britain's foreign office minister for Africa, Asia 
and the UN, expressed "dismay" over the law's impact on women's rights. 
"We are caught in the Catch-22 that the Afghans obviously have the right 
to write their own laws," he said. "But there is dismay. The rights of 
women was one of the reasons the UK and many in the west threw ourselves 
into the struggle in Afghanistan. It matters greatly to us and our 
public opinion."

Malloch Brown did not meet Karzai yesterday, but said "one can 
confidently assume" that it came up in the private bilateral sessions 
the Afghan leader held with western officials in the course of the day. 
Diplomatic sources said later that women's rights had been one of the 
subjects of the Clinton-Karzai meeting.

At the Hague conference, instigated at Washington's request to rally 
international support for Obama's new strategy in Afghanistan, Finland's 
foreign minister, Alexander Stubb, called on the Karzai government to 
respond to the Guardian report, a call echoed by Iceland, while Norway 
also expressed concern over the trend in women's rights.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/01/afghanistan-womens-rights-hamid-karzai