Discussion Papers Series I Afghanistan Legislation and Gender

Addressing the need for the ensuring gender responsiveness of the legislation in Afghanistan is one of the important aspects of efforts to ensure gender equality. Over the last several years the efforts to improve legislation from gender perspective has been successful however still there is a number of issues that needs to be addressed. Issues including age of marriage, forced marriage, rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment are among are still among the controversial issues that should be properly addressed in the law reform process.

UN Women in line with its mandate on improving national legislations to ensure gender equality and with support from prominent Islamic scholars initiated a process of developing technical papers that will analyze and discuss some of the gender related issues in the legislation in more depth. The technical papers are developed mainly to provide tools for further discussion and analysis of the gender related concerns in the law reform process in Afghanistan.

In this publication five technical papers on gender related issues that are most controversial has been selected and analyzed in light of Afghan legislations, Islamic jurisprudence and the examples of other Muslim countries. The topics selected includes 1) Child Marriage, 2) Sexual violence and Assault, 3) Rape, 4) Zina/ Adultery and 5) Right to Withdrawal and Mediation.