Breitbart

Organizers have planned protests in at least seven provinces on Thursday throughout Iraq in response to the introduction of amendments to a core family legal framework that could legalize child marriages, deprive widows of their inheritance, and facilitate sex slavery.

The Iraqi Parliament began to debate amendments to the Personal Status Law on Sunday that would, critics say, effectively dissolve the country’s universal standards to protect women and girls on matters such as consent to marriage, alimony, and custody of children by allowing men to opt out, choosing traditional Shiite or Sunni Islamic mandates, instead. While child marriages, sex slavery, and other abuses are rampant in modern-day Iraq, they are not technically legal. Iraqi law currently requires both men and women to be 18 years old to enter marriage, allows a woman to inherit her husband’s assets in the event of his death, and allows for unconditional inter-religious marriage.

The amendments to the secularized Personal Status Law, passed in 1959, would allow the relevant men in a marriage or proposed marriage to choose whether to apply Sunni sharia rules or Shiite sharia. It does not discuss other religions, such as Christianity, Zoroastrianism, or the Yazidi faith, which once boasted vibrant constituencies in Iraq but were almost entirely exterminated by the Islamic State (ISIS) “caliphate” in the past decade. Members of minority religions would most likely have to abide by the current form of the Personal Status Law.

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