A/HRC/43/48 2. Personal status and family laws 17. The Special Rapporteur draws particular attention to discriminatory legal provisions in personal status and family laws that are informed by interpretations of religious traditions. As recently noted by the Secretary-General, discrimination in personal status and family laws can prevent women from leaving violent relationships and have a significant bearing on their safety and well-being (E/CN.6/2020/3, box III.1), as well as numerous other rights. Across regions, participants in the consultations for the present study highlighted examples wherein Governments either enforce religious principles that promote gender-based violence and/or discrimination against women and girls through personal status or family law, or delegate authority in administrating personal status rights and affairs regulated by family law to religious communities. Despite recent reforms to the “guardianship system”, women and girls in Saudi Arabia continue to face systematic discrimination in law and in practice in several areas and are inadequately protected against gender-based violence.8 Denominational family law in Israel, to which there is no civil alternative, permits divorce only with the consent of the husband, which reportedly can coerce women to forfeit property or custody of children. 9 Although Tunisia stands out in the Middle East and North Africa Region for many of its protections for the human rights of women and girls, the Personal Status Code of 1956, rooted in an interpretation of Islam, requires further amendment to guarantee gender equality in inheritance rights (see also A/HRC/40/58). 18. Participants in the consultations on South and South-East Asia reported that, in many countries, Governments have advanced efforts to combat gender-based violence and discrimination, such as by criminalizing marital rape, mandating written consent for marriage from all parties and specifying a minimum age for marriage. Some States, however, delegate legal authority to minority religious communities to respect pluralism and multiculturalism, but do so in ways that dilute gender equality norms. For example, the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act of Sri Lanka, which, unlike national legal provisions for non-Muslim women, does not identify a minimum age requirement or require a woman to consent to marriage, leaving Muslim women and girls unprotected by national provisions. 10 Such arrangements, the participants emphasized, mean that people were accorded different degrees of protection, depending on their religious identity, and many women and girls were left at risk of sexual and gender-based violence within their religious communities without any legal remedy. The Special Rapporteur and his predecessors have repeatedly called upon States to eliminate in law and in practice, including in plural legal systems, all forms of marriage that restrict and/or deny the rights, well-being and dignity of women and girls, including early and forced marriage.11 3. Laws and policies enacted with reference to religious beliefs that criminalize conduct protected under international human rights law 19. Human rights treaty bodies and special procedures have expressed concern about laws in several countries that criminalize consensual relations between adults of the same sex, thereby discriminating against persons on grounds of their sexual orientation and gender identity. 12 The Special Rapporteur notes that States that maintain laws criminalizing consensual same-sex relations have occasionally referred to religious “justifications” for maintaining them. Officials in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa, South and South-East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have “justified” the maintenance of the country’s legal prohibition of homosexuality on the grounds that it upholds the tenets of Islam or Christianity. 8 9 10 11 12 See www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/saudi-arabia/report-saudi-arabia/ and www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24879&LangID=E. See www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22336&LangID=E. See http://connectblog.com/2019/09/challenging-divine-law-protecting-gender-rights-in-sri-lankaand-beynd/. Communications referenced in the present report are available at https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/ TmSearch/Results. For an example of a communication described here, see communication SDN 3/2018. See communications UGA 6/2016 and EGY 17/2017. 5