The Zahraa Moroccan Women’s Forum, the women’s arm of the Justice and Development Party, has criticized the National Human Rights Council for setting up a “working group on a proposal to revise the Family Code”.
The Forum noted with surprise in a statement that the group included “a number of personalities, most of which express one intellectual focus, and even one of the associations was represented by two personalities, at a time when an intellectual and cultural current that had its own dissemination in civil society, and his struggle for problems was excluded.”
The Women’s Forum emphasized that public debate on the Family Code “should be in line with the methodological and reference directions announced by the King in the Throne Speech”, stating that the legal reference to the Family Code “stems from the provisions of Islamic Sharia and that jurisprudence should be carried out within its framework in light of the main goals.” Sharia law.”
In this regard, Butaina Karruri, head of the Zahraa Moroccan Women’s Forum, believes that the National Human Rights Council “is a constitutional institution, but not an ordinary institution, since it is established not only in accordance with national law, but also in accordance with international standards included in the Paris Principles, which define the criteria for its work, since the principle of intellectual pluralism is the most important principle that an institution must abide by.”
The spokeswoman explained that “the topic of the Family Code remains a sensitive topic, and King Mohammed VI has been working to define the methodology and general framework for its work,” noting that the National Council took the initiative to create a committee, “and we noticed that it is open to one movement , noting that the public debate on the Code is divided into two different visions.
And in this context, she mentioned that there is no current that fights for women and family issues on the basis of Islamic exile, asking: “How can a national institution that claims to be based on Parisian principles not represent this current on the committee? She added: “This is a dangerous indicator of the institution’s credibility. Patriotism reminds us of a practice that might be called undemocratic.
In its statement, the Forum “denounced in the strongest possible terms the exceptional methodology adopted by the president of the National Human Rights Council in forming this group, in violation of the requirements of the organizational law and the Council’s internal system.”
The aforementioned body considered that what the Council called “a working group on a proposal to revise the Family Code, a group that represents only itself and is devoid of any institutional or legal legitimacy.”
The Forum expressed its involvement in the public debate on the Family Code, based on the methodological determinants of the Throne Speech on July 30, presented by “the goals of Islamic law and the characteristics of Moroccan society”, as well as in the “region of the Principality of the Faithful”, where the King, as Commander of the Faithful, undertook “not to allow what God has forbidden, and not to forbid what God has allowed, especially in matters that are formulated by the final Qur’anic texts.”
