Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pradhan, Rajendra

Titel

Legal Pluralism in the Supreme Court: Law, Religion, and Culture Pertaining to Women’s Rights in Nepal

Ist Teil von

• Religion in Disputes, 2013, p.165-182

Ort / Verlag

United States: Palgrave Macmillan

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In May 1993, three years after the restoration of democracy and the promulgation of a more liberal constitution, two women legal activists filed the first public interest litigation (PIL) pertaining to women’s rights in the Supreme Court of Nepal (Meera Dhungana v. HMG/N). Encouraged by this case, the increasing influence of international human rights and women’s rights discourses, and powerful donor agencies promoting these rights, legal activists subsequently filed more PILs pertaining to women’s rights, including property rights for women and protection against marital rape and discrimination in employment and citizenship.’ The petitioners cited the modern and mainly secular Constitution and international law to challenge the legal validity of gender-discriminatory state laws, especially provisions in the National Code (Muluki Ain) that treated women as second-class citizens.2 These discriminatory state laws were influenced by Hinduism, the religion of the majority of the population in this Hindu kingdom. In questioning these state laws, the petitioners, themselves Hindus, challenged the patriarchal Hindu state as well as the gender-discriminatory norms of the majority of Nepalese. The state, as the respondent to the petitions, and some Supreme Court judges vigorously defended gender-discriminatory laws and traditional social order, sometimes warning of social chaos if these laws were amended.