Understanding the marital rights of Assyrian women: a radical feminist examination of legal promises and protections made under Iraq's 2005 Constitution

Prior to the 2005 Constitution, Assyrian women’s marital rights were only protected by Iraq’s commitment to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and a limited amount of Provisions found within Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law.

However, with the introduction of the 2005 Constitution, Assyrian women were not only recognised as an ethnoreligious minority for the first time in history, they were also protected under Article 41’s personal status guarantee. Although such progressive steps for Assyrian women, the 2005 Constitution stipulated that no laws were to go against the teachings of Islam, with any divergence being seen as a violation of the law, a factor which had never been seen in any previous Constitution’s (Article 2, 2005 Constitution of Iraq, p. 4).