How have Tunisian women’s rights been transformed, if at all, since the Arab uprisings?

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Answer:

Introduction
Women have been central to the events that have shaken Tunisian politics since the Arab Spring in 2010-11. They have played roles as protesters and politicians, activists and academics, journalists and photographers, and whether poor or privileged, urban or rural. Tunisia has long occupied an important position in the Arab world since the historic promulgation of its progressive family law in 1956, which placed the country at the forefront of the Arab world in regard to women’s rights (Charrad 2007). In an extensive comparative survey of Arab countries in 2009, Freedom House ranked Tunisia first in the major categories that concern women’s rights, including “autonomy, security, and freedom of person,” and “political and civic voice,” (Kerry & Breslin 2010).

In this article, we address two related questions. In the first section, we consider how Tunisia came to occupy a premier position in regard to women’s rights through the promulgation of its Code of Personal Status (CPS) in 1956, well known throughout the Arab world, and the continuous amendments to the CPS over a half-century since then. In the second section, we discuss some of the current debates on women’s rights in Tunisia following the Arab Spring, including the mobilization of women around the controversial Article 28 in the draft of the new constitution. By “women’s rights,” we mean women’s rights in the law as it concerns personal status and family law. We focus on this aspect of the law because family law is, as lawyer and human rights activist Asma Khadar (1996: 2) stated unambiguously, “the gate of freedom and human rights for women” in the Arab and broader Muslim worlds. Family law has significant implications for women’s lives, including their ability to make life choices freely and to pursue educational and professional opportunities.

Code of Personal Status: A Post-Colonial Expansion of Women’s Rights
Family law, which encompasses rules and regulations concerning marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance, continues to be the site of some of the most fundamental differences in women’s rights across the Middle East and North Africa. In Tunisia, the newly formed postcolonial state initiated reforms of family law following the country’s independence from France in 1956. This was an action from above, or a top down policy, which occurred in the absence of an organized women’s movement. As Charrad (2001: 219) has shown, the CPS was “not a response from the state to pressures from a women’s mass protest movement.” In promulgating the CPS, the government made decisions for the society as a whole without engaging the community or facilitating the perspectives of the citizenry through popular referendum or other channels of popular expression.

Tunisia’s new CPS introduced significant changes in family law such as the abolition of polygamy, the end of men’s privilege of unilateral repudiation as a way to terminate a marriage at will, the ability of a woman to file for divorce, and the enhancement of women’s custodial rights over children. Inheritance laws, for which there are strict and clear provisions in the text of the Qur’an itself and thus constitute an especially sensitive issue, remained the least modified legislation. These reforms, mediated by nationwide institutions and a national court system rather than local authority structures, provided state protections for women. Even though educated women were in a better position to take advantage of the law, much knowledge about the CPS percolated through different strata of society, giving Tunisian women at large the possibility of utilizing what the new laws had to offer.

Reforms beneficial to women continued during the regime of Zine El Abedine Ben Ali who paraded women’s rights as part of a general portrayal of Tunisia as embracing modernity on the international scene. The reforms again were largely a top down policy, although women’s rights advocates started to make their collective voice heard in defense of women’s issues in the 1980s. Their actions were severely restricted, however, as were those of other associations in the 1990s and 2000s. Furthermore, women’s associations were composed of urban, elite women in Tunis whose interests were disproportionately represented in Ben Ali’s policy formulations to the relative exclusion of poor women (Khalil, forthcoming). Nevertheless, meaningful reforms occurred during that period. For example, as recently as in 2007, the minimum age of marriage was raised to 18 for both men and women, who could marry as early as 15 under the prior legislation (Charrad and Ha, forthcoming). Other reforms initiated under Ben Ali in the 2000s expanded women’s rights in regard to marriage contraction, alimony, and custodial rights over children.   

The “Jasmine Revolution”
On January 14, 2011, former President Ben Ali resigned from office following weeks of protest across Tunisia. The self-immolation of a twenty-six year old Tunisian vendor, Muhammad Bouazizi, on December 17, 2010, started the uprising in the rural district of Sidi Bouzid. Protests then engulfed larger cities in Tunisia, including the capital of Tunis. By early January 2011, mass demonstrations were being regularly held in the name of freedom, an end to corruption, and in demand of Ben Ali’s immediate departure from office. Popular media dubbed the ousting of Ben Ali, and the protests that preceded it, the “Jasmine Revolution” (Arieff 2011).

A resounding feature of the protests was the presence of women who demonstrated as professionals, students, and citizens. Women participated as organizers and demonstrators and, consequently, gender equality has been central to discussions of Tunisian politics, most eminently as it relates to elections and the drafting of the constitution (Beardsley 2011). In the case of the former, a quota to include women on party lists for the October 2011 National Constituent Assembly (NCA) election was instituted into law by the transitional government (Dasgupta and Bangham 2012). This measure, drafted and supported by Tunisian women’s civil society groups, attempted to enhance gender parity in representation though it was limited because the law did not specify how high on party lists women were to appear. Consequently, many parties ignored the spirit of the law by meeting the requirement to include women on party lists but offering them the lowest positions on the list (Associated Press 2011).

Regardless of their position on party lists, women were nevertheless successful candidates in elections and ascended to positions in the NCA in 2011. The Islamist party Ennahda acquired the largest number of seats in the assembly and boasted 42 female candidates of a total of 49 total women elected to the 217-member NCA (Byrne 2011). Ennahda Executive Council member Mounia Brahim emphasizes the mixed trajectories of Islamist women in politics by saying, “Look at us. We’re doctors, teachers, wives, mothers – sometimes our husbands agree with our politics, sometimes they don’t. But we’re here and we’re active” (Marks 2011)

Following Ennahda’s electoral victory in Tunisia, widespread concern was expressed about whether the power of parties not only sympathetic to but actively supportive of a more extensive role for religion in Tunisian jurisprudence might imperil the liberal legislation in place since the 1950s and enshrined in the CPS. There were tenable fears that Ennahda’s success at the polls in 2011 heralded a broader influence of religion in the country to establish what Hamad (2013) called “Tunistan,” or an Islamic state. The preeminent presence of women, particularly Islamist women, in the newly elected assembly profoundly shaped the tenor of debates about the constitution that was drafted over the course of the following 16 months. It has been in the context of the constitution drafting that we have witnessed a transformation of Tunisian politics from actions from above to a public debate about gender in which Tunisian women, Islamist and other, have been central figures.

Debates about Gender in the Constitution: Article 28
Heated debates in Tunisia regarding gender have concerned political representation and, most recently, references to women in the newly drafted constitution. The popularly elected NCA had as one of its mandates to draft a new constitution, drawing on elements from the preexisting 1959 constitution. The draft of the constitution became the site of struggle, popular outcry, and national dialogue in a way that signifies a restructuring of Tunisian politics and illustrates the significance of a burgeoning civil society. Article 28 entitled “Women’s Rights,” constituted one of the most debated and disputed articles in the first draft of the constitution, which was released on August 13, 2012. The article was generally translated as deeming women’s roles in the family as “complementary” to that of men (Draft Constitution of the Republic of Tunisia 2012; emphasis added).