Is Religious Autonomy a Threat to Gender Equality?


Montserrat Gas-Aixendri is Full Professor of Law and Religion at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain) 

 

In a 2013 Report, the UN Special Rapporteur acknowledged that freedom of religion or belief and gender equality sometimes seem to be in an artificial antagonism. In fact, synergies between the freedom of religion or belief and promoting gender equality remain systematically underexplored, discouraged, or delegitimized (para. 32-33, 42). Though the 2020 Report on religious freedom and gender equality rightly condemns violence and discrimination against women, girls, and LGBT+ persons based on the pretence of religious freedom, I must confess that I expected this report to have the courage to take on the challenge of finding synergies between the freedom of religion or belief and promoting gender equality. However, in many ways my expectations are left unmet. In the following paragraphs, I will try to comment on how the report addresses the issue of autonomy of religious institutions in the context of gender equality and why some of its points should be criticized. (more…)

Continue Reading Is Religious Autonomy a Threat to Gender Equality?

The Chained Wife Problem: Religious and Secular Perspectives

Dmytro Vovk is Director of the Centre for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and co-editor of Talk About: Law and Religion.

In January 2020, it was reported that a Jewish woman in London launched a private prosecution against her ex-husband who had refused to grant her a religious divorce, called a get. Though they were divorced under civil laws, the absence of a religious divorce chained the wife in her marriage and negatively affected her life in the community, primarily by preventing her from remarrying. The woman and her lawyers claimed that the husband’s behavior should be prosecuted under a 2015 law criminalizing “controlling and coercive behavior” as a form of domestic abuse. The threat of criminal conviction convinced the ex-husband to grant the woman the get, and she later revoked her action as a result. (more…)

Continue Reading The Chained Wife Problem: Religious and Secular Perspectives

The Aguna Problem – Recent Developments

Haim Shapira is Professor of Law at Bar-Ilan University (Israel) 

In a recent case in the UK, a Jewish woman was able to obtain a get (bill of religious divorce) from her husband by launching a private prosecution against him for controlling or coercive behavior. This has been described as a landmark case in the struggle of Jewish women to obtain religious divorces from uncooperative husbands. In this short post I explain the problem of aguna (“chained” wife), review recent developments in this area, and explain why this last case is truly groundbreaking. (more…)

Continue Reading The Aguna Problem – Recent Developments