The social activist was addressing the audience at an event focused on the UN’s ‘International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women’ organised by the US consulate at Marriot Hotel. National Commission on the Status of Women Chairperson Anis Haroon explained that, under the ordinance, hundreds of women were imprisoned on unsubstantial rape and adultery charges. When the Women Protection Act brought about amendments to it in 2006, not a single woman was arrested on zina (fornication) charges.

According to Haroon, land ownership disputes are one of the causes of violence against women. “It’s a cultural practice not to give inheritance rights to women,” she explained, “where there is less land holding, there is less violence.” She went on to speak on legislations on the rights of women, adding that the bill against harassment at the workplace has prompted several complaints from victims working in banks or private institutions.

She was, however, disappointed with the fate of the bill against domestic violence, which lapsed in the senate. “A major attack came from Islamist ideologists, who believe that this violence should not be recognised as it will increase the rate of divorce.”

As for the rights of divorced women, Justice (retired) Majida Rizvi had an interesting suggestion. She said that a divorced woman, who does not work, should be paid a lump-sum amount of money for the services she rendered at home. “If she has not contributed outside, then her contributions at home should be acknowledged.”

Middle Eastern laws for woman are better than those in Pakistan, observed human rights activist and lawyer, Iqbal Haider. “I was shocked to find out that the UAE, (despite) being an orthodox country, has better laws,” he said.  “Maintenance is granted for one year, and not three months, as compared to Pakistan.” If a man harasses a woman in a marketplace, then he can be arrested right then and there.
According to Justice (retired) Nasir Aslam Zahid, in 2003 and 2004, over half of the women in prisons were there because of the Hudood Ordinance. Now, no new prisoners have been brought in since the amendment in 2006. However, with the success of the amendments, people should not stop struggling to repeal the Hudood Ordinance, he said.

For his part, US Consul-General William J Martin felt that it was shocking that, even in the 21st century, one in three women around the world experience some form of gender-based violence in their lifetime. “Women’s participation in society is a mark of development and social enlightenment,” he said. “We all have to speak out against brutality to women, and will not tolerate their exclusion from society.”

Even women in the assembly are not safe, said MPA Humaira Alwani. They are harassed by their male counterparts, something she has experienced many times when trying to speak about her resolutions.
She also spoke of how victims of violence often want to fight but their families settle the matter with compensation. She cited the case of an acid burn victim, Maria Shah, as an example who maintained that the man who attacked her should not be pardoned till the day she died. Her family, however, felt that Rs500,000 were forgiveness enough.

Read the rest of this entry »

The trend for marriage is steadily declining, with married couples now making up less than half the population, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). Couples also appear to be choosing to separate increasingly later in life, with 17.6 per cent of all 53-year-olds now divorced. The age at which the highest proportion of the population is divorced has risen dramatically, from 35 in 1971 to 40 in 1991 and 52 in 2009. It rose again in the 12 months to 2010 to 53.

The ONS said that it was a reflection of the ageing population as well as rising divorce levels that such a high proportion of 53-year-olds were divorced, when compared with 12.3 per cent of 40-year-olds in 1991 and just 2.1 per cent of 35-year-olds in 1971. Equally, as fewer couples are choosing to marry, the divorce rate appears to be finally starting to drop. Just under 114,000 couples were granted a divorce in 2009, the lowest figure since 1974.

The ONS suggested that there were fewer divorced men than women overall because men because men were more likely to remarry than women. Fewer marriages and the long-term rise in divorce rates also partially explains the slight drop in the numbers who are widowed, down to 3.1 million from 3.5 million in 2001. The report said that 51.9 per cent of the adult population were single, divorced or widowed.
"One of the main reasons for the decrease in the married population and the increase in the single population is the growth of cohabitation by unmarried couples,” it said. "In the early 1960s in Britain fewer than one in a hundred adults under 50 are estimated to have been cohabiting at any one time, compared with one in six in 2010."

The number of couples getting married has been steadily declining since the 1970s. Anastasia de Waal, of the Civitas think-tank, said: "When interpreting these statistics it's crucially important to factor in the gap between what couples want to do and what they are doing in practice. "Attitude surveys repeatedly show us that the majority of young people today would like to marry, an aspiration which is notably highest amongst cohabiting couples.

"In harder times, many couples feel that they are not able to afford the requisites – not so much the wedding itself, but things such as owning a home and a car. "As such, steady rises in unemployment and the cost of living over recent years may well be a key contributor to a continuing drop in the number of married couples."

Read the rest of this entry »

With the help of my colleagues, I offer the following possible solutions: Schedule more matters for hearing each week. Prior to 2006, 10 to 15 decrees nisi were considered four days each week, and Fridays were dedicated to hearing applications for decrees absolute. Since 2006, no more than 30 decrees nisi and 15 decrees absolute applications are scheduled for hearing in any given week.

Allot time on the court's roster for hearing divorce applications as is done for other civil matters. In other words, if 15 divorce matters are assigned to a judge on any given day, at least two hours should be set aside for those matters to be considered.

If all documents filed in divorce proceedings are to be checked by a registrar before they are submitted to the judge, more registrars need to be assigned to vet the documents. Alternatively, as no other civil matter which ends with a judge's order is subject to that scrutiny, the need to have registrars vet documents could be eliminated altogether; especially as the rules do not require it to be done.

If there are errors or omissions in documents which are placed before a judge (for example, the draft order contains a typographical error), it may be better to notify the petitioner's attorney of the error and schedule a date for the matter to be further considered rather than simply issuing a requisition, which causes the matter to fall to the bottom of the long list of other divorce matters.

Before placing an application for decree nisi before a judge for consideration, 'setting down papers' could be prepared to verify that all documents are in order and adequate notice of the hearing date could be sent to the petitioner's attorney. In this way, there may be fewer rejected applications clogging the system.

This list is not exhaustive, and there may be more workable solutions than those I have proposed. What is true is that, with all the reviews that have been done over the years, the discussions can and should now end. It is time for resources to be committed to implementing some of the solutions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Small British firms are helping staff pay the costs of their divorces to keep them focused on work, a law firm has said. Pannone, the Manchester-based law firm, said that bosses were increasingly taking a "paternalistic" approach to their employees' divorces.

It said that there had been a "marked increase" in the number of companies paying for initial advice sessions and contributing to legal costs for divorces. Some firms even considered their employee so vital they were willing to foot their entire legal bill, running into thousands of pounds.

The law firm said it had not heard of any cases of employers funding divorces until five years ago. But the number of cases has doubled in the last three years. It said that "economic necessities" in the recession made small companies increasingly concerned to do whatever it took to retain skilled and experienced members of staff.

Vicki McLynn, a senior associate at the law firm, said: "They notice the effect which a divorce can have on someone's productivity far more than a much larger company would. Given the current economic climate, they can ill afford such distractions, especially if the individuals involved are senior and important to a business's fortunes. "More than doing someone a favour which allows them to sort out their private life while keeping a career on-track, it represents a gesture of commitment and support from the firm which, in turn, generates reciprocal loyalty from the staff concerned."

Firms weigh up the cost of providing legal support against their profitability, the law firm said. Divorces can last up to 18 months and can affect an employee's ability to concentrate on work, it added.
Ms McLynn said: "The firms with which we have had dealings are quite pragmatic. They regard any contribution to an employee's bills during a divorce as money well spent if it helps maintain the volume and quality of work done."

Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the FTSE 100 closed in negative territory – falling 67.04 points to 5139.78 – for an eighth day in a row. According the FTSE Group, the last time the FTSE 100 fell for more than eight days in a row was between January 15 2003 and January 27 2003, when the blue-chip index fell for nine days. There was, though, a seven-day losing streak between January 7 2009 and January 15 2009. Back in 2003, the FTSE 100 gave up 12.41pc during its nine-day losing streak. This time round the blue-chip index lost just 6.24pc over the last eight days. Roughly £104.3bn has been wiped off the FTSE 100 in the last eight days, according to the FTSE Group.

Financial shares bore the brunt of Wednesday's selling, with hedge fund company Man Group tumbling 10pc during the trading session. Other asset managers such as Schroders and Ashmore Group were also hit hard amid speculation they have seen clients withdrawing capital from their funds. Dealers also dumped banking and insurance stocks, including Barclays and Prudential, on concerns about potential exposure to worsening eurozone sovereign debt crisis.

Read the rest of this entry »

When a couple divorces, both husband and wife usually experience sadness and sometimes even grief over the loss of the relationship. One of the spouses, or perhaps both, may feel as though he can't trust his own judgment or any other prospective mate. He may have a profound sense of failure. These feelings are normal.

Step 1

Allow yourself to feel the emotions as they come up. This stage is important, according to the Women's Divorce website. Everything you feel is normal, but expect to go through a period where your ability to think clearly and make rational decisions is compromised.


Step 2

Work through the “emotional” divorce just as you work through the “legal” divorce. The emotional side of divorce may include loneliness and mourning the loss of your former life, such as home, in-laws, financial stability and friends, says Women's Divorce.

Step 3

Surround yourself with family and friends you know you can trust. Your identity as a wife or husband has just been shattered. Because you may feel that you failed in your marriage, your self-esteem will probably be suffering, according to Divorce Info, a website guide to divorce.

Step 4

Learn to trust yourself as you confront the decisions you make in your new life. You’re going to doubt yourself, according to Divorce Info. You have to make your decisions based on the information you have, not on hindsight. Make your decisions and adjust them when you get new information. Keep an open mind, advises Woman's Divorce.

Step 5

Make the changes in your new life based on what you want that life to be. Figure out what you want--be it an increased spiritual presence, the opportunity to spend time with the friends you enjoy, learning a craft or even pursuing a degree. It’s up to you to figure out what you want, says Divorce Info.

Tips and warnings

* To become comfortable with yourself as a newly single person, you need to get to know who you are. You’ll experience all the stages of grieving, according to Woman's Divorce. These include denial, anger, resentment, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Montreal-based psychotherapist and family counsellor is looking for North Island input into her groundbreaking  study on divorce and children. Vikki Stark is a researcher studying the effects of the moment of revelation for children when they learn their parents are divorcing. “I’m looking for participants in my study,” Starksaid.

“Either adults who were kids or teens when their parents divorced, or current kids or teens who can participate with the consent or help of a parent.”Stark, the author of two books also based on large studies — My Sister, My Self and Runaway Husbands — said her current research could be vital because it could lead to providing parents in the future with the gold-standard in terms of how to tell the kids about the split.

“The moment you hear your spouse wants to leave — even if you’ve been fighting and going to marriage counseling or whatever  — it’s a shock and a huge turning point,” she said.

“Yet for kids whose whole family changes in the course of five minutes, we don’t really relate to the level at which that moment of revelation has. For the rest of their lives they’re going to divide their childhood in half ... it becomes that watershed moment that divides their childhood.”Stark said she believes the current literature on the subject simply does not delve deep enough into that moment in a way it could be better understood.

“There’s a lot in any book about children and divorce, there’s a few paragraphs about how to tell the kids, ‘Don’t do it like this, do it like that, say this, tell them it’s not their fault,’” she said.

“You know, all of the same platitudes are trotted out all the time; but the importance of this research is we’re actually going to hear the voices of people who were kids or teens when their parents were divorced and what struck them, what hurt them, what helped them, what was said that was important, what were their worries, and these will help parents shape how they’re going to make this presentation.”

Read the rest of this entry »

A Hindu woman cannot be evicted from the matrimonial home after divorce except through procedure established by law, as there is no provision for her automatic eviction, the Supreme Court has ruled. A bench of justice GS Singhvi and justice SD Mukhopadhyay, in a judgment, said though a woman may not have a legal right to continue in the house of the ex-husband, yet the latter cannot forcibly evict her.
The court gave the ruling while upholding an appeal filed by Ranjit Kaur challenging the decisions of the Punjab and Haryana HC which had upheld her eviction from the house of a disputed property upon a decree of divorce granted to the husband Major Harmohinder Singh, an army officer.

“...even though in the decree of divorce, the appellant has not been given a right of residence and her occupation of the suit property can be treated as unauthorised, respondent No 1 (Singh) cannot evict her except after following the procedure established by law.

“The material placed on record shows that the appellant had entered into the property as the wife of respondent No. 1. Therefore, even though, after passing of the decree of the divorce she may not have a legal right to continue to remain in possession of the suit property, respondent No. 1 cannot be given liberty to forcibly evict her,” the bench said.

The apex court, however, rejected the plea of the woman that Singh should be restrained from alienating the suit property (house). The couple was staying at the disputed property in SAS Nagar, Mohali. They were married in 1978.

A decree of divorce was granted on October 4, 2001, in favour of the husband who had filed a petition under Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, for dissolution of marriage on the ground of cruelty.

Read the rest of this entry »

So divorce has zoomed forcefully into the Zimmer zone now that the only reported rise in the divorce rate – in the most recent, just-published, figures – is in the 60-plus age range. Leave aside the possibility that this is also the group that was most likely to have succumbed to marriage en masse and suddenly the dynamics of family life could begin to take on more subplots than the average soap opera.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but presumably not when your newly "silver separated", freshly retired, Pilates-proofed and therefore very fit mother is pursuing the same pool of men as you. And Mother may have the added advantage that she comes with no strings attached, since she's done babies and orange blossom, has no interest in IVF and no longer seeks a househusband to sort out the domestic engineering while she builds her fledgling career.

Of course, men have long shed housewife number one for a younger uber-model. Now, it seems, women too, better prepared by a lifetime of earning their own money and making their own way in the world of work, are happy to take the step from "I do" to "I definitely don't any more". While only 5% of divorces are among the over-60s, the rate of disengagement is growing fast.

Of course, for some divorcees, male and female, loneliness and families fractured beyond repair may ensue. But, ironically, if the marriage has had more of the better moments than the bad, if commitment helped to weather the relationship once romance waned a tad, then that's exactly the kind of apprenticeship that may help to make the most of whatever life serves up next.

So, many of the more affluent ex-wives, rejuvenated by the liberation of divorce (marginally cheaper than Botox and the average pot of anti-ageing cream) will now rapidly shift those experiential years of retirement from boating in Borneo with the old man and driving the people carrier à deux into diverse rivers in South America.

Instead, they can now wander around the wilder shores of internet dating (so long, that is, that they lie about their age: the rules of this market place are going to have to change) or, revolutionary thought this, they set out to enjoy unbounded adventures totally seule.

A whole new scenario for the family Christmas now begins to open up. Start-over-dad (affectionately known by his grown-up offspring as SOD) is nursing his nine-month-old daughter and contemplating what lies under the tree for a 70-year-old man like himself who has everything, including two marriage certificates and a new wife. Mother, meanwhile, is too busy showing the grandchildren the latest pics of her kayaking classes in the Rocky Mountains to bother about her once traditional place as resident housekeeper.

Meanwhile, her sons and daughters argue with their spouses in the kitchen over Delia or Jamie's way to cook the turkey while mentally calculating just how much of the family heritage has been spent by Her-No-Longer-Indoors and the old SOD's new thirtysomething spouse who much prefers Moët to prosecco.

"Selfish, moi?" Mother and Father, amicably divorced, might say. Too damn right – and why not after 30 or 40 years toiling at the matrimonial rock face? It's never too late to put the fun into the ex-factor.

Read the rest of this entry »

For almost as long as Newt Gingrich has been in public life, an unflattering story has shadowed him: That as a rising young Republican congressman from Georgia, Gingrich ended his first marriage by serving his wife with divorce papers while she lay in a hospital bed dying of cancer.

The story has been trumpeted by Gingrich’s political opponents, endlessly recycled by the news media and repeated even by would-be allies, including social conservatives, who have long had doubts about the thrice-married former House speaker. As candidate Gingrich has risen to the top of some polls in the past few weeks, the story has inevitably surfaced again. Variations have turned up on MSNBC and in National Journal, various columns and blogs and two British newspapers in just the past week.Over the years, Gingrich himself has declined to comment on the story’s details, although when asked about his divorces and extramarital relationships, Gingrich has usually relied on some variation of the comment he made to the New York Times earlier this year: ‘’There are things in my life I’m not proud of, and there are things in my life I’m very proud of.’’

Yet while the thrust of the story about his first divorce is not in dispute — Gingrich’s first wife, Jackie Battley, has said previously that the couple discussed their divorce while she was in the hospital in 1980 — other aspects of it appear to have been distorted through constant retelling.

Most significantly, Battley wasn’t dying at the time of the hospital visit; she is alive today. Nor was the divorce discussion in the hospital “a surprise” to Battley, as many accounts have contended. Battley, not Gingrich, had requested a divorce months earlier, according to Jackie Gingrich Cushman, the couple’s second daughter. Further, Gingrich did not serve his wife with divorce papers on the day of his visit (unlike a subpoena, divorce papers aren’t typically “served”).

Gingrich’s marriage to Battley had been troubled for many years before it dissolved 31 years ago, both parties have said. Battley, who is seven years older than Gingrich, had been Gingrich’s high-school math teacher in Columbus, Ga. They began dating after he graduated and were married in 1962, when Gingrich was 19 and a freshman at Emory University in Atlanta.

In time, the marriage grew contentious, and the couple spent several years in counseling. In the spring of1980, Gingrich left her, Battley told The Washington Post in 1985. Around this time, the couple gathered their children, then ages 16 and 13, around the kitchen table at their home in Fairfax County and told them they intended to divorce, Cushman wrote in a syndicated column in May (none of the family members nor Gingrich would comment for this article).

The hospital visit took place later that summer, several months into their separation. Battley, who was undergoing treatment for uterine cancer, had had two prior surgeries, and Gingrich’s visit occured a day after a third operation at Emory Hospital, in which doctors removed a benign tumor, according to Cushman.

Read the rest of this entry »