Friday, May 21, 2004

Meanwhile, in Iran...



Iran's current reformist parliament, which will be replaced with conservatives this month, approved a bill that grants women equal inheritance rights to men. The proposed law states that a woman is entitled to all of her husband's estate if there are no other heirs.

Under the current law in Iran, a widow receives only one-eighth to one-fourth of her husband's possessions. According to BBC News, the reformist parliament will not have much success persuading the hard-line Guardian Council to approve the bill because the Council has rejected most of the reforms proposed in the past.


The Iranian women's movement is an active one. It recently demonstrated against a miniseries run by the state-controlled television. This series is said to depict women as second-class citizens and polygamy as normal. Did the hard-line Guardian Council approve this program? I suppose so.