cultural challenges - male guardianship

• Under Article 5 of CEDAW, State parties must: 

   ‘modify social and cultural patterns….with a view of achieving the elimination of…stereotyped roles for men and women’
• Violations of Article 5: Amnesty International

  • On International Women’s Day (8th of March, 2022), Saudi Arabia passed the Personal Law Status. 
  • Matters related to family life were previously subject the ‘discretionary application of the rules of Sharia and interpretations of islamic texts by a male dominated judiciary’ 
  • The law codifies many of the informal yet widespread problematic practices inherent in male guardianship system. 
  • ‘Entrenches a system of gender-based discrimination’ 
• Personal Law Status

  • PLS allows the influence of male guardianship to be pervasive.
  • Codifies stereotypical gender roles requiring wives to ‘obey in righteousness’.
• Under Article 9 of CEDAW, State parties must : 

  ensure…neither marriage…shall automatically change the nationality of the wife, render her stateless or force upon her the nationality of the husband.
• Violations of Article 9

  • Women must have the consent of a male guardian to get married. 
  • Only men can be legal guardians, and unlike men, only women must have the consent of a male legal guardian to get married and for the marriage contract to be validated. 
  • A woman cannot choose her legal guardian, as the law defines the order of male legal guardians for marriage by rank, beginning with the woman’s father, then his guardian, then the grandfather and so on. 
• • The CEDAW committee has stated that a woman’s right to choose her spouse and enter into marriage freely is central to her life and dignity and equality as a human being.  
  • ‘The Saudi government has fallen short of its promises to foster an environment in which women have equal rights to men’
  • ‘The government should immediately amend the discriminatory provisions in the Personal Status Law so that the male guardianship system is abolished entirely and women have equal rights and responsibilities with regards to marriage, divorce, and decisions about their children.’
• Saudi Arabia clearly exhibits cultural relativism, which is the view that ethical and social standards reflect the cultural content from which they are derived. Fused with realism, Saudi Arabia upholds its cultural customs more than that of its obligations to human rights treaties, despite their universality