Over the past three months, significant legal reforms on women’s rights have advanced in a handful of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Last week, Lebanon’s Parliament finally repealed its rape law, which allowed assailants to escape punishment if they wed their victims. Two weeks earlier, Jordan, too, closed its “marry your rapist” loophole, and has also amended an article in its penal code that granted lesser penalties for “fits of fury,” a.k.a. honor killings — none too soon for at least some of the 36 cases of women murdered last year still before the courts.

Tunisia, birthplace of the Arab Spring, has gone farthest on this front. In July, its Parliament passed a landmark legislative package on violence against women. The laws break new ground in the region by stiffening penalties for sexual violence against minors (including the removal of a “marry your rapist” provision), mandating compensation and follow-up support for survivors, and explicitly recognizing that men and boys, as well as women and girls, can be victims of rape.

When it comes to women’s rights, governments across the region are generally more comfortable with criminalizing violence than they are with protecting freedoms.

But last week, President Beji Caid Essebsi of Tunisia announced a significant departure from business as usual by launching a commission on how to put laws on individual liberties and equality into practice for women, including the incendiary topic of equal inheritance between the sexes. He also urged the country’s ministry of justice to repeal the law prohibiting Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men, one in force across the region and much of the wider Islamic world.

Read the source article at The New York Times