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Khulaa
Khulaa is Law 1 of 2001. It affirms the right of the woman to initiate a divorce. Its release caused a great uproar in the Egyptian media.
Its articles say:
The married couple should agree on khulaa. If they do not and the wife still wishes to divorce, she must agree to give up her financial and legal rights related to the marriage and return the dowry her husband paid to her. Then the court divorces her from him.
The court does not agree to divorce the married couple unless a serious attempt at reconciliation is made. The reconciliation period is three months, as documented in the 2nd paragraph of Article 18 and the 1st and 2nd paragraphs of Article 19 of this law. If the attempt fails and the wife declares her wish to be separated from her husband and that she is not able to give him his rights as a husband, the court divorces her from him.
It is not allowed to give up the custody of children or any other responsibilities concerning their care, for example financial responsibilities. The khulaa is a clear divorce and is incontestable.
The Khulaa conditions as documented in the law:
1) Attempt to reconcile,
The court is obliged to offer reconciliation services to the married couple before it awards a khulaa. This has to be done once if they do not have children and twice if they have. In case they have children there is a period of minimum 30 days and maximum 60 days between the two reconciliation attempts.
2) Delegate two persons to try to reconcile them. The court requires the wife and the husband to delegate relatives. If one of them fails to do this, the court is obliged to delegate someone.
3) The woman has to declare openly that she no longer wishes to live with her husband.
4) The woman has to return the dowry as documented in the marriage document.
Results of a khulaa judgment:
1) Clear divorce.V
2) Husband receives the dowry he paid for her.
3) The husband no longer has any financial responsibilities towards his wife.
What is not allowed in khulaa:
The law stipulates that a khulaa judgment should never affect the children. The parents do not have the right to give up custody or their financial responsibilities towards their children. Both parents must retain their rights to see their children.
The last paragraph of the Khulaa law:
The last paragraph of Article 20 from Law 1 of 2001 indicates that the judgment for khulaa cannot be contested in any way.
This is in accordance with the aim of the law, which is to give the woman the right to initiate a divorce by giving up her rights related to the marriage. This is a way to release married women from unsuccessful relationships with their husbands. If there is a possibility of contestation, then the aim of khulaa is lost. In a typical divorce, where the woman asks the court to divorce her, she has to wait years and at the end her request might be refused.
The number of khulaa cases CEWLA has adopted since the approval of the law:
CEWLA has adopted 40 khulaa cases as of now. 22 cases were won and the woman got divorced. The other are still under consideration in the Cairo and Giza courts.
More activities for Cewla concerning Khulaa:
The conference of Harvest ( two years of work on Khulaa):
The project of Khola comes as the first form of cooperation between CEWLA and the American Embassy in Cairo.
In this regard, CEWLA has held a public conference about Khola under the title of "The Harvest… two years of work on Khula". It was held in October 22nd to culminate two years of efforts made in observing and analyzing the various aspects of the Article No. 20 of the Law No. 1 of 2000.
The mentioned law was essentially issued to facilitate the judicial procedures relate to the personal status issues in order to recognize the contribution of this article in take the edge off women's suffering they face in the cases of personal status.
The project was also aimed to observe the various problems and difficulties related to the article of Khola through the practical implementation and proposing practical solutions to amend the legislation and training the judges.
The project was carried out through preparing several specialized papers in specific fields, namely:
1. A paper analyzes the effect of the media role in treating the article of Khola, particularly during the reviewing of this law in order to show the impact of this role on the cases of Khola.
2. A paper analyzes the report of the People Assembly that included the discussion of Khola made by members of parliament in order to show the effect of the social attitudes and directions of the different members in issuing the law.
3. A paper analyzes the judgments that heard in the lawsuits throughout a year of implementation of the law at the governorates of Cairo, Alex, Fayyum, Giza, Quena and Sohag.
Also under the process of executing this project, the center had observed and analyzed the cases of Khola and those one of repudiation that occurred in the mentioned governorates during the same year in order to extract whether the Khola has really contributed in mitigating the suffering of women or it was hindering her access to the rights due to her in this field.
The findings of this procedure shown in the table below:
| Governorate |
Khulaa 2000 |
Khulaa 2001 |
Repudiation 1999 |
Repudiation 2000 |
Repudiation 2001 |
| Cairo |
2695
(112 hearings) |
2740 |
2577 |
2509 |
2367 |
| Giza |
1199 "73" hearings |
1160 |
1243 |
1125 |
1116 |
| Fayyum |
131 "2" hearings |
88 |
384 |
293 |
244 |
| Alex |
907 "28" hearings |
896 |
1018 |
825 |
846 |
| Quena |
205 |
208 |
500 |
509 |
326 |
| Sohag |
186 "5" hearings |
159 |
108 |
178 |
226 |
The method of executing this project took the following steps:
The cases of Khola in the mentioned governorates were observed and the documents of which were photocopied, the process that also applied to the cases of repudiation.
The hearings of the cases of Khola during the year of 2001 were observed.
The informative and media materials that treated the question of Khola were collected and used in analyzing the effect of the media role on forming of a public opinion with or against Khola.
The various reasons of filing the lawsuits of Khola and the views of judges towards them were observed and analyzed .
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