• Download the Mauritania section of Home Truths: A Global Report on Equality in the Muslim Family in English or Arabic.

Mauritania has a mixture of Muslim laws and French-influenced civil law. Although the Family Code has some positive aspects for women, it is not always enforced, as local traditions have a strong influence in some communities.

There are a number of challenges in the Mauritanian laws:

• Age of marriage: Although the minimum age of marriage is 18 under the Family Code, child marriage is still practised in Mauritania and girls as young as six years old are married, often in return for monetary compensation given to the family by the older spouses.
   
• Guardianship (wilaya): The Family Code considers women to be minor citizens regardless of their age, educational, cultural or economic backgrounds. Consequently, women do not have the legal capacity to make decisions that concern them, their families or their children. Women are obliged to receive the approval of their guardian to contract a marriage.
   
• Trusteeship: Trusteeship over children of a deceased father is granted to the family of the father instead of the mother. This proves very problematic in cases where the father’s family has unfairly used and seized the children’s financial rights and properties. In order to protect the rights of their children, women should be the trustees over their children’s money.
   
• Inheritance: In cases where the deceased father has only daughters and no sons, part of his inheritance is distributed among his brothers and other members of the family and not to the daughters and the wife only.
   
• Ownership of property: According to the Family Code, women are allowed to only use 25 per cent of their property, which is unacceptable in the current developments where a large number of women have pursued high levels of education and are active players in today’s labour market and thereby creating their own wealth.
   
• Divorce: Divorce is still perceived as a unilateral decision taken by the man and is regulated accordingly.
   
• Decision-making: The principle of men’s exclusive responsibility to take decisions related to the matrimonial home and the family is enshrined in the Family Code. This is an example of how traditions and Islamic teachings have been mixed, as this practice has no basis in the Shari‘ah.
   
• Labour: The Mauritanian labour law discriminates against women in many ways, specifically in matters of retirement. The age of retirement for women is 45, whereas men are allowed to work until the age of 65. Furthermore, the family of a deceased retired woman is not eligible to benefit from her retirement rights, whereas the family of a deceased retired man can.

• The Association of Women Heads of Households has focused in recent years on detecting manifestations of discrimination against women in Mauritanian law and exposing these to the national public opinion. Working from an innovative religious vision, the Association tries to introduce the conditions necessary to overcome these forms of discrimination. In this context, the Association has organised workshops attended by legal experts along with Shari‘ah scholars and actors in the field of promoting women’s and family rights defending human rights, and has also prepared several studies to legitimise and authenticate its point of view from a legal perspective.
   
• In workshops organised by the Association, agreement has been reached on various points:
  • The Family Code should include the right of women to choose the agent that they deem appropriate to conclude their marriage contract and their right as mothers to remain the trustees of their children’s wealth after the spouse’s death.
  • The inheritance of the deceased father, if he has no sons, should be distributed among the remaining daughters and wife only, and not to his brothers.
  • Divorce should no longer be a unilateral right of the husband only, but rather a joint decision by both parties that allows also for women to access divorce through courts.
     
• The Association of Women Heads of Households conducted a study on Mauritania’s general reservation to Article 16 of CEDAW. The study concluded that there is nothing in CEDAW that is incompatible with the Shari‘ah. The study helped NGOs successfully gain the support of different religious leaders who had been opposed to CEDAW. Furthermore, recommendations were drafted and sent to the President of Mauritania, who ordered the formation of a drafting committee to examine whether and how to incorporate these recommendations into the Mauritanian law.

• ‘Child marriage tradition turns into trafficking’, IRIN News, 9 December 2008.