Health and Fitness

Ugandan Lawmakers Set to Vote on Marriage, Divorce

Uganda"s parliament recently passed bills on domestic violence and female genital mutilation. Now one female lawmaker hopes colleagues will approve in January long-awaited modernizations of marriage and divorce. Page 2 of 2Outdated Laws Remain Since 1964, shortly after independence, lawmakers" efforts to reform these laws largely failed, leaving matters bound to outdated British colonial laws, which in the case of adultery, for instance, punished a woman with 10 years in jail but let the man go free. (In 2007 the Constitutional Court scrapped the adultery section in the old Divorce Act, ruling it unconstitutional and sexist.) During the mid-1990s, the ruling political party in Uganda, the National Resistance Movement, sponsored family law amendments to other bills to modernize laws on marriage, divorce, separation and property. Museveni refused to support the legislation, since it only recognized monogamous marriages and Uganda"s Muslims, about 12 percent of the population, wanted the right to polygamy recognized. The current bills, which modernize all laws relating to marriage and divorce, languished until September this year when the Uganda Law Reform Commission introduced the new act to legislators during a seminar. The proposed law will only govern Christian, Hindu, African customary and Baha"i marriages. A separate law for Muslim marriages will come later. The current bill does not outlaw the traditional practice of the husband"s family giving marriage gifts to the wife"s family, the so-called bride price. Some women"s advocates oppose the bride price because it can inhibit abused woman from leaving their husbands for fear that they could demand refund of the gifts. In the proposed legislation, bride price will not be returnable in the event of divorce. Efforts to modernize marriage and divorce laws were spurred by a high-profile 2003 divorce case involving the country"s first female vice president, Dr. Specioza Wandira, who accused her husband, an engineer, of physical abuse. The country"s Catholic leaders intervened in a bid to reconcile the couple, but they separated. "Dr. Specioza reflected what goes on in our communities," said Alisemera. "If a woman of her social status and education is battered, then what would happen to a woman in the village?" Raymond Baguma is a staff reporter for The New Vision newspaper in Uganda. He also has a blog: http://www.rbaguma.blogspot.com. * First * Previous *1 *2

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