Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni politicians last year introduced three bills which later became a headache for the parliament as discussions and voting on them were repeatedly delayed due to agreements.
However,
it's easy to be generous with someone else's money...
in a surprising move on Tuesday, the politicians agreed to pass all three bills, ending months of disputes.
One of the bills seeks the return of properties to their original Kurdish and Turkmen owners. The land was taken from them and given to Arab settlers by the Baathist Revolutionary Command Council decades ago.
"The Iraqi parliament took a big step to dissolve the decisions that were made to occupy Kurdish and Turkmen lands 20 years after being saved from the previous regime and after 50 years of occupation, " Shakhawan Abdullah, deputy speaker of the Iraqi parliament said at the parliament building while surrounded by fellow Kurdish politicians from rival parties.
Abdullah thanked the Kurdish blocs for their "unified stance" and attributed the bill’s passing to "vigilance and continuous efforts."
The disputed and diverse areas, particularly oil-rich Kirkuk,
... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time...
have long been a flashpoint between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the federal government. Under the Baath regime in the 1970s, Kurdish and Turkmen lands were confiscated and given to resettled Arabs. After the US toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Iraq's constitutionally mandated de-Arabization policy under Article 140 aimed to reverse these demographic changes. In July 2023, the Council of Ministers approved a draft law to revoke Baath-era land confiscations.
"I would like to congratulate the Iraqi parliament presidency and the Kurdish factions and all those who played a role in the passage and approval of this bill," Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leader Masoud Barzani said in a statement.
"I hope this will be the beginning of correcting all the mistakes and falsehoods that have been committed against the interests of Iraqi citizens throughout the history of the Iraqi state," Barzani added.
The general amnesty bill seeks to amend the 2016 law’s definition of affiliation with terrorist organizations, a key Sunni demand for joining the ruling State Administration Coalition. Sunnis argue that thousands from their community have been unjustly imprisoned in Shiite-dominated Iraq since 2003 over alleged terror links.
"A decision was made to pass the general amnesty bill which is a very important decision at this stage and a positive message to the component that feels oppression due to the security situation around the country," Iraqi parliament speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said in a statement.
Mashhadani, who is a Sunni, added that the process was accelerated thanks to cooperation with Kurdish and Shiite "brothers."
He said the law applies to all Iraqis but has benefited some groups more than others, not just the Sunni component.
The 1959 Personal Status Law governs marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The amendment, introduced by independent politician Raed al-Maliki and widely supported by Shiite politicians, allows religious rules to dictate personal status matters. The proposed changes faced strong opposition, with over 130 politicians signing a petition against it and activists warning it could legitimize child marriage and erode legal protections for women.
sThe proposed bill states that for Shiites, the Jaafari school of law would apply, which allows marriage for girls as young as nine and boys at fifteen.
"This [false or heretic] innovation is alien to the principles of legislation and serves the agenda of the politicians to achieve their narrow interests in a way that increases the division of society and threatens its security and stability in these difficult circumstances," Shiite politician Haider al-Salami said in a statement on Facebook.
Regnum expands on that last item, courtesy of badanov:
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.[Regnum] On January 21, the Iraqi parliament adopted amendments to the personal status law, effectively allowing marriage to girls aged nine and older. This was reported by the CNN television channel.
The changes would expand the powers of Islamic courts in family matters, including marriage and divorce. The country's law sets 18 as the minimum age for marriage. But the amendments would give clerics the ability to make decisions based on their interpretation of Islamic law. Some argue that it would be acceptable for girls to marry in their "early teens." However, the Ja'fari school of Islamic law, which is revered by some religious authorities in Iraq, suggests nine years as the minimum.
Activists say the changes undermine the country's 1959 Personal Status Law, which unifies family law and provides guarantees for women. Supporters of the changes say the law has been brought "in line with Islamic principles" to reduce the influence of Western culture on Iraqi culture.
The article notes that half of the legislators present at the session did not vote, which violated the legal quorum. Some parliamentarians shouted protests, and some even went up to the podium.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, investigators in the Moscow region opened a criminal case against a 39-year-old Syrian for sexual intercourse with a minor. The couple registered their marriage in Aleppo, Syria, back in 2022, when the bride was only 14 years old. After some time, the husband moved her to Russia. The laws of the Syrian Arab Republic allow such early unions, but in the Russian Federation, the couple attracted the attention of law enforcement officers. At the same time, the young wife gave birth to her first child at the age of 15 in a perinatal center in the Moscow region. At the moment, she is pregnant again. According to the sanctions of Part 1 of Article 134 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the man may face up to four years in prison.
The editor-in-chief of the Regnum news agency, Marina Akhmedova, noted in her Telegram channel that, according to Russian law, the Syrian will probably be released from liability. To do this, it is enough to establish that the person and the crime he committed have ceased to be socially dangerous due to his marriage to the victim. At the same time, she emphasized that the man quite consciously violated the law of the country in which he lived for a long time, and did not even hide it too much. In her opinion, such behavior leads to the breakdown of taboos in people's subconscious, as a result of which foreigners can calmly violate Russian law in their homeland, and "bring the consequences."