Mozambique's Family Law passes!

The Oxfam-supported Women's Coalition wins a hard-fought victory in Mozambique to reform family law and win unprecedented rights for women. On December 16, 2003, after more than a decade in the works, the Mozambican Parliament passed a new Family Law. This legislation is a major victory for women's rights in Mozambique and a powerful testimony to the strength of the Oxfam-supported Women's Coalition. The new Family Law protects a broad range of women's rights and for the first time legally recognizes customary marriages

"This was a great day for women in Mozambique," said Latiffa Ibrahim, President of the Mozambican Women Lawyers Association.

A Long Struggle

The Women's Coalition, an alliance of Mozambican women's rights organizations, had pioneered a four-year campaign to reform family laws in Mozambique, which were seen by many as major impediments to gender equality.

After Mozambique gained their independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambican jurists drafted a new family law to take into account contradictions between common and customary legal systems. The project was shelved when civil war plunged the country into crisis””a war that would drain the country for nearly two decades. Work on the Family Law resumed in the 1990s, and a draft revision was proposed by a coalition of women's groups.

To this day, the majority of Mozambicans””particularly the illiterate””regulate their lives virtually independent of official laws, preferring local customs and practices. Yet official laws were drafted with very little consideration of local customs. As a result, Mozambican law courts are ill-equipped to deal with a litany of legal cases, such as marital disputes between couples married under customary law (marriages contracted outside of common law, usually by their family elders and local chiefs).

The Effects of the New Law

In the past, women married under customary law could not claim any property or custody rights because their marriages were not recognized by the official law of Mozambique. The Family Law protects informal unions between men and women. Men who live with women for years will frequently avoid formalizing these relationships because they cannot pay an adequate dowry to protect their property. Under the new law, women who have lived with their partners for more than a year are entitled to inherit the property of their husbands.

The Family Law also asserts that both spouses have responsibility over the family and can decide who will represent the family on a particular issue. In the past, women required their husband's consent before taking a paid job.

The law also offers more protection to children by increasing the minimum age of marriage from 14 and 16 years (for girls and boys respectively) to 18 years for both sexes. In Mozambique, members of the woman's family traditionally decide whether or not a girl is to wed. Marriage brings money and gifts to the bride's family, so a family desperate for money might seek to marry their daughter despite her young age. By marrying at an older age, research has proven that women's economic opportunities are greater, their educational levels are higher, and their health from delaying childbirth is much better than those marrying at younger ages.

Oxfam's Involvement

During the past four years, Oxfam America has targeted gender legal reform in Southern Africa as a vital component of our overall mission. By funding organizations in Mozambique with various expertises in gender equity, Oxfam brought together a rich coalition of women's rights groups that were able to pool their resources and drive the legal reform process to a major victory. In addition to funding this coalition, Oxfam provided technical assistance and skills training in areas such as advocacy, coalition-strengthening, monitoring and evaluation.

Of immediate concern to the Coalition is the need to disseminate and implement the new law. The Coalition is planning an ambitious outreach program that will involve simplifying the text of the law to make it more accessible to ordinary Mozambicans, and raise awareness using a variety of media, including national and community radio.

Following their success in passing the Family Law, Mozambique women's organizations are also targeting the country's penal code, which does not punish domestic violence as a criminal offence. They are also calling for a revision of the country's inheritance laws, which they say do not protect widows.