BILIA symposium on divorce and family law issues
Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA) organised a symposium on “Revisiting Divorce and other Related Issues on last Saturday at its Dhanmondi auditorium. There were two papers presented at the programme; one was presented by Mr. Shaikh Md. Mujahid Ul Islam, additional chief judicial magistrate of Shariatpur and another one was presented by Mr. Toufiqul Islam, research officer of BILIA. Professor Dr. Shahnaz Huda, Department of Law, University of Dhaka presided over the programme. Ms. Dalia Parvin and Ms. Taslima Yasmin of the same department were two distinguished discussants on those two papers. Honorary Director of BILIA, Dr. Shahdeen Malik was also presented at the symposium.
The title of the first paper was interest of women and tangible to intangible legal reform. In this paper, Mr. Mujahid Ul Islam tried to show his practical root level experiences as he has been in the judiciary since 2008. He gave some statistics where stated that in the year 2016 itself, there are 261 cases where women are murdered due to family dispute; among them 152 are murdered by their husbands. He has talked about substantive law reform where only way out to dissolve marriage should be judicial divorce for both, husband and wife.
The next paper by Mr. Toufiqul Islam discussed the empowerment of Muslim women in Bangladesh through post-divorce maintenance. He talked about ‘mataa’ what is mentioned in the Holy Quran and the current understanding of this idea. He also brought out some case studies on this issue, the linkage between empowerment and post-divorce maintenance also came out in the discussion. Judicial activism of Bangladesh Supreme Court in the case of Hefjur Rahman v Shamsur Nahar Begum ignited the hope of making mandatory the post- divorce maintenance but the Appellate Division went for traditional interpretation classifying post-divorce maintenance as the consolatory gift.
The writer works as a Research Officer (International Affairs) at BILIA.
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