04 March 2010

In the Middle East, Modest Progress Made on Women’s Rights

Study of Arab nations and Iran finds gains and discrimination

“In several areas, women’s rights have actually improved, and nowhere is this more evident than in education,” says Sanja Kelly.

By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer

Washington — A new report on women’s rights finds progress in almost all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

The report by Freedom House, an independent, nonprofit organization that studies and advocates for human rights worldwide, shows “notable progress, particularly in terms of economic opportunities, educational attainment, and political participation.”

The good news, it said, is that “important steps have been made to improve the status of women over the last five years, and 15 out of 18 countries have recorded some gains.” Yet women continue to face unequal treatment, the report said, and in the MENA region, “the gap between the rights of men and those of women has been the most visible and severe.”

This is Freedom House’s second effort to analyze the restrictions on women, country by country, in 17 Arab nations and territories; this report also includes Iran. Kuwait, Algeria and Jordan offered the most progress since the release of the first report in 2005. The only countries where women lost ground in their freedoms were those that have faced violent internal conflicts and a rise in religious extremism.

The report “charts progress as well as remaining challenges, giving countries a compass for the way forward,” said Dalia Mogahed, a Freedom House trustee and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

Mogahed said the report offers people in the region the chance to compare the status of women in their countries with that of their neighbors. By the standards used in the study, Tunisian women enjoy the greatest degree of freedom in the region.

Ronald Schlicher, the U.S. principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, welcomed progress in the economic, educational and political lives of women in the Middle East, “and for the broader society as well.” Still, he said he was struck by the “substantial deficit in human rights” in many countries.

Schlicher noted that the greatest gains came in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which had scored the lowest in the report five years ago. In 2005, Kuwait gave women the same political rights as men, and four years later, Kuwaitis elected women to parliament for the first time. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates appointed women to judgeships for the first time. And women in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar gained the right to travel without the permission of a guardian.

The report also points to “notable reforms” in Algeria and Jordan. As Morocco did earlier, Algeria “made sweeping amendments to its personal status code in 2005, vastly improving women’s power and autonomy within the family,” the report said.

Jordan’s changes include protections against gender-based violence. Its new law, only the second of its kind in the region, after Tunisia’s, “specifies the procedures that police, the courts, and medical authorities must follow when dealing with victims of domestic abuse.”

The study evaluated each country on the extent to which women who live there enjoy the principles included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On a scale of 1 to 5 — with 5 meaning that the government and others almost never prevent women from exercising their rights and that women almost never face gender-based discrimination — no country in the report scored higher than 3.6 in any of the five categories on which they were rated:

“The solution is not about working on laws. The solution is about working on the mentality,” says women’s rights activist Dalia Ziada.

• Nondiscrimination and access to justice.
• Autonomy, security and freedom of the person.
• Equal rights and equal opportunity.
• Political rights and civic voice.
• Social and cultural rights.

Ten of the 18 countries and territories did not score as high as 3 in any of the five categories; a score of 3 means that women sometimes are not free to exercise their human rights, that they have “adequate human rights protections but they are poorly implemented” and that they “occasionally face gender-based discrimination.”

Sanja Kelly, who directed the Freedom House project, said the trend is in the right direction for the region’s women. “In several areas, women’s rights have actually improved, and nowhere is this more evident than in education,” she said. Female literacy rates are up, and in many countries, women far outnumber men on college campuses. The report found that women in every country studied had gained in “access to education, literacy, university enrollment, and the variety of academic fields available to them.”

They also are making more money. “Women are more represented in the workforce than ever before,” Kelly said. On average, the report says, 28 percent of women in the Middle East are “economically active,” the lowest rate in the world. But the rate is rising, and women are playing a more prominent role in the workplace.

Among the problems that Kelly said are common in most countries of the region: laws that set the status of women below that of men in court and on family matters; laws that prevent women from conveying citizenship to their spouses and children; the acceptance of harassment and violence against women; and laws that promise equality but are ignored.

Rana Husseini, a journalist and author of the report’s section on Jordan, said her country had made important improvements in the lives of women. One problem she has covered is “honor killings.” Such killings have sometimes gone unpunished, but Jordan has set up a special tribunal to deal with them and handed down stiff prison terms. “We need to eliminate and erase any law that excuses the murder of women,” Husseini said.

Huda Ahmed, who wrote the Iraq report, said women there, like women in other countries going through violent unrest, have far more rights on paper than in reality. “The problem is, for every step forward, we take 10 steps backward, and always related to violence,” she said.

Those involved in the study said women in many countries face a large gap between what the law says and what some in society permit. “We have very strict laws against sexual harassment, but women are being harassed in the streets, in the workplace, even in their homes,” said Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian activist and head of the North Africa Bureau of the American Islamic Congress.

“The solution is not about working on laws. The solution is about working on the mentality,” she added.

Ziada said Egyptian women can vote and hold office but that they “are usually used as decoration” by political parties.

One area that Ziada said offers promise for women: the spread of the Internet. Online, she said, women and men are equal because they cannot be distinguished from one another, and women can use that experience to look for equality in the rest of their lives.

“We all know that once we empower women, we empower all of society,” she said.

The report is available in English at the Freedom House website, including a chart and graphs (PDF, 68KB) showing and comparing the countries’ scores in each category of women’s rights. The group is posting Arabic translations of the report and the country-by-country sections. The Freedom House program that focuses on rights in Iran, Gozaar, has posted a Persian translation of the report on women’s rights in Iran.

The report was funded in part by the State Department but was produced independently, and its findings and recommendations are those of its authors.