Activists to demonstrate under Dome for more women seats in elections bill

AMMAN — Women activists will head to Parliament's gallery next week to demand a seat for women in each of the constituencies that will be designated in the 2015 draft elections law.

The decision to escalate their demands was made after the Lower House Legal Committee last week endorsed the 2015 draft elections law without taking into consideration the women movement’s demands.

Several women's rights activists, who are part of a national coalition campaigning for one seat in each constituency, expressed their discontent over the legal committee’s decision to pass the bill almost exactly as referred by the government with some "insignificant" changes.

Jordanian National Commission for Women (JNCW) Secretary General Salma Nims expressed her frustration over the bill, saying “this will only make us more persistent in our demands”.

It seems that “women’s empowerment is not part of the government’s priorities, because they turned their backs on us when they drafted the law and now the House Legal Committee did the same”, Nims told The Jordan Times recently.

“We have called on local organisations to be present in the gallery in Parliament when the law is set to be discussed by MPs to emphasise our demands,” she said, adding that the organisations will also meet with women parliamentarians.

Jordanian Women’s Union President Tahani Shakhshir echoed Nims’ frustration, saying the committee's decision on the draft elections law was a “real step backwards for the women’s movement”.

“Although we have our reservations regarding the entire election law, we decided to join the national coalition demanding a seat for women in each constituency,” Shakhshir told The Jordan Times in a recent interview. 

Shakhshir charged that the government is not interested in women’s empowerment, “although Jordan signed and ratified many international conventions pledging to increase women’s participation in public life to a minimum of 30 per cent”.

Jerash MP Wafa Bani Mustafa was also dismayed by the legal committee’s decision.

“This is way below expectations. There is an embedded patriarchy in dealing with women’s issues in Jordan.  But we will not give up,” Bani Mustafa told The Jordan Times.

“We will lobby from inside the Lower House to ensure that women get a seat in each constituency as stipulated in the draft bill,” she said.

In remarks to The Jordan Times last week, the House’s First Deputy Speaker Mustapha Amawi said the legal committee has "turned its back on all the suggestions it received from the people it had met with", adding that "99.9 per cent of the law remained exactly as in the government version".

For his part, MP Abdul Munim Odat, head of the legal committee, defended the outcome of its deliberations, saying: "If the draft bill specifies a seat for women in each constituency then female candidates cannot win in direct competition outside a quota.”

Odat told The Jordan Times in a recent interview that the committee had met with several groups and organisations to listen to their demands “but this does not necessarily mean that we will comply with them”.

He called on the women’s movement to work on changing the attitudes of women voters “who almost always prefer to vote for men because they do not believe in women MPs”.

Under the 2015 elections bill, the number of Lower House members has been reduced to 130 from 150, based on the open proportional list at the district level.

The new law is based on an at-large voting system in which all candidates can run for parliamentary elections on one large multi-member ticket.

Under Article 9 of the bill, eligible voters will have a number of votes equal to the number of seats allocated for their district in the Lower House.