Top Muslim women’s advocate backs Cox’s Equality Bill

Cassandra Balchin, co-founder and Chair of the Muslim Women’s Network-UK has welcomed Baroness Cox's Equality Bill.

The Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill targets both those few sharia tribunals that were set up under the 1996 Arbitration Act, and the much more numerous and informal sharia councils (misleadingly called ‘courts’) of which there are about 85, without mentioning Islam.

Balchin told Lapido:  ‘In my work with Muslim women, like many others I have anecdotal evidence of gender discriminatory arbitration being conducted under the 1996 Arbitration Act, including in family matters which ought to be beyond any arbitration tribunal’s jurisdiction.’

Balchin, a convert to Islam, is the editorial coordinator of the highly acclaimed survey Knowing our Rights: Women, Family, Laws and Customs in the Muslim World, a publication of Women Living Under Muslim Laws and a member of the International Advisory Group for Musawah.  She has long claimed that Muslim women in Britain suffered from fewer rights than in many Muslim countries.

She also welcomed other aspects of the Bill that may get less attention, chiefly the proposed provisions to penalise false claims to legal jurisdiction.

Sharia councils often misleadingly assume an authority they do not have.

 ‘Unlike the arbitration tribunals, sharia councils have no legal status but a minority sometimes misleadingly imply their mediated decisions carry some legal weight.

‘The Bill’s provisions, if made law, would probably increase pressure on the Sharia councils, many of whom perform an important social service, to improve their practice and actively clarify for their clients before initiating mediation that their decisions have no legal weight.’

Cox’s Private Members Bill is unlikely to have its second reading until the autumn.  An unlikely alliance of interests shared the panel at a press conference last Monday night, including Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society, Diana Nimmi of the Kurdish and Iranian Women’s Rights Organization, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, , and the American evangelist Jay Smith.

The Bill aims to regulate the 2010 Equality Act, and complement the amendments to the Arbitration, and Family Law Acts of 1996, by making discrimination on grounds of sex unlawful in Arbitration.  It also proposes to tighten up laws against polygamy.

It makes it unlawful to treat the evidence of a woman as automatically of less value than the evidence of a man, and also makes it unlawful to arbitrate in inheritance disputes on the basis that presupposes that women should automatically inherit less than men.

These changes are clearly specifically aimed at Sharia tribunals because of the historic Sharia law principles that the evidence of a woman is worth only half that of a man..

Neil Addison, a barrister specialising in religious law warned that proposals could make it very difficult for religious courts such as Jewish Beth Dinn or Catholic Marriage Tribunals both of which deal with purely religious Divorces (Jewish) or Annulments (Catholic), and do so only after the Civil Courts have dissolved the marriage.

‘There is also the possibility that a strict definition of the proposed offence could even prevent employers holding internal disciplinary hearings dealing with alleged criminal acts by employees such as theft at work’, he said.

‘The major question is whether Caroline Cox is attempting to interfere in freedom of choice i.e. the principle that people should have the freedom to choose private adjudication of their disputes without the law interfering.’

What is at stake for sharia councils is competing laws in England. 

He said:  ‘If the ordinary courts are being asked to enforce a decision made in a sharia arbitration tribunal, or in cases of mediation within the sharia councils, then the state also has a right to decide what legal principles are being applied in the making of that decision.’

Balchin believes that, ‘Bill or no Bill, the Sharia councils will no doubt continue.’ 

She added: ‘The real question is whether they will respond more rapidly to pressure from within the community to move in line with understandings, including among Muslims (www.musawah.org), of equality and justice that require gender equality in family matters.’

Polygamy

The Bill also draws attention to the fact that existing laws against polygamy are going unenforced.  It makes provision to ‘inform individuals that a polygamous household may be without legal protection and a polygamous household may be unlawful’  - which could have implications for the policing of marriage. 

Neil Addison says:  ‘It might bring pressure on the police to enforce Section 75 of the Marriage Act 1949 which makes it a criminal offence to perform a marriage ceremony that is not registered under the Act.’ 

It is a crime for a British citizen to commit bigamy either in UK or abroad, but, says Addison, the Act is not being enforced.