A brief look at new draft of Egypt’s personal status law

CAIRO – 20 March 2023: In his speech at the celebration of the 2023 Egyptian women’s Day and the Ideal Mothers’ Day, Minister of Justice Omar Marawan said that the new draft of the personal status law includes provisions and articles “capable of reducing divorce cases” as it could fall by 3% annually.

The divorce rates in Egypt increased by about 32,000 during the year 2021, compared to 2020, said Dr. Hussein Abdel Aziz, advisor to the head of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, in June 2022.

The most prominent articles in the new law are as follow:

1- Establishing a family care fund and an insurance policy to financially support the family against the high expenses and challenges related to personal status issues.

2- Granting new powers to judges to deal with urgent cases in order to support the family

3- Allowing the judge to get data on the divorced man’s income from the employer, in order to estimate the alimony.

4- Developing a new system that collects all family disputes and then referring them all to one court

5- Shortening the terms of adjudication in family cases

6- Developing measures to reduce the divorce

7- Documenting divorce, while divorce obligations shall be on the divorced woman from the date of her knowledge of it.

8- Preserving the financial assets that were formed during the marriage

9- Reformulating marriage and divorce documents to ensure that they include what the two parties agreed upon in cases of marriage and divorce

10- The husband must notify his first wife of his second marriage

11- Not allowing those who refuse to pay alimony to their children to see them

12- Adding an article allowing the father to host his children for two or three days a month

13- Adding an article allowing non-custodians who are abroad to see children online.

14- Introducing a deterrent criminal penalty for anyone who refuses to return children after hosting or who prevents the other party from visitation right

15- Ensuring that children should continue their education as it was before the divorce, and granting the Public Prosecution the authority to be notified of the income of the two parties to ensure financial coverage for educational expenses

16- Introducing legal articles that deal with the problems of unofficial marriage when It comes to proving parentage while emphasizing that there is no alimony for marriage in case of unofficial marriage.

17- Reformulating matters of guardianship over money.