'Legal' Discrimination
DISCRIMINATION against women in the Nepalese society runs deep. Battling these
discriminations presuppose that there are laws in place that ensure protection of women
against discriminations. It is easy to imagine the long battle against gender
discriminations when various legal provisions spread in different acts and rules and
regulations themselves are discriminatory against women. The passage recently of what was
popularly known as "women's property rights" bill and which was in fact an
amendment to the Civil Code, gave only a partial cause for celebration for women as there
are still 28 provisions in the Code that can be termed as discriminatory against women.
This came out in a report drawn by a high-level committee to review the existing laws
concerning discrimination against women. The committee was constituted last year to review
the existing laws and acts discriminatory against women, draft an amendment bill
encouraging equality, and present recommendations essential for women's empowerment.
The findings of the committee were quite
revealing of the regards in which women are held by our legal regime. The Civil Code
certainly contained the largest concentration of anti-women laws, which now mercifully
stands at 28, a lot down from 69 different provisions that it held before. But the Code,
the one receiving the ire of women activists campaigning for mainly parental property for
years, is not the only place where such discriminatory laws can be found. The army act,
the land act, the registration of births, deaths and personal incidents, the act defining
Nepali law, the bonus act, the provident fund act, the income tax act and the children's
act account for other 53 discriminatory provisions. That is still not all. An additional
36 various rules and regulations contain 85 provisions that are discriminatory from the
gender perspective. Prime Minister Chand assured the amendment bill drafters that the
government had begun all necessary measures towards correcting the legal provisions
discriminatory against women. The government, indeed, would do well to take into
consideration the recommendations that the report gives. Clearly, since the traditions and
values are so skewed against women in many respects, affirmative actions are needed if
protection and empowerment of women are to be achieved. Measures like increasing access of
women to the criminal justice system, stopping girl trafficking and sexual exploitation
and so on are essential to allow women to realise the full individual potentials to be
partners in the development process. Doing away with 'legal' discriminations would be an
important preliminary step.
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