Recommendations made by civil society activists

i. The need for data to be provided on minor marriage and adolescent fertility rates in Egypt, particularly in rural and marginalized areas, to include details of the impact of early marriage on the health and obstacles to the human development of both women and children.

2. The importance of sustaining and advancing an organized women’s movement to take up women’s issues and monitor the application of relevant laws.

3. The need for the work of local and non-governmental groups in raising aware­ness among women and creating networking tools for them, to draw up joint plans for the development of laws affecting them, combating illiteracy, ex­amining the phenomenon of violence against women and supporting centres providing rehabilitation to victims of domestic violence.

4. The importance of encouraging individual women to report violations com­mitted against them to the relevant authorities, and supporting them λvhether though media campaigns or legal aid.

5. The need to activate ‘family guidance’ centres attached to the Ministry of Social Affairs, supplying them with qualified experts to make citizens aware of the rights guaranteed in personal status law, and how they can claim these rights.

6. The need to increase efforts to raise awareness among women in popular and marginalized areas, especially in villages outside the capital, including by establishing fixed centres in poor areas for family guidance and legal assistance and working towards establishing a group of lawyers for the purpose.

7. That the time has come for the Egyptian government to withdraw its reserva­tion to the article on equality in all matters to do with marriage and the family in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which it ratified in 1981.

8. That civil society associations should have a basic role in implementing the new procedures, which enable the wife to present her claim to court through a form including all the relevant data, without fees and with no need for a lawyer to be appointed; civil society associations should be working to provide ‘legal aid’ to hundreds of thousands of women in this regard, and could also appoint lawyers to take up cases.

g. The minimum age of capacity for marriage should be increased to eighteen for females and twenty for males.' Besides the immediate effect this would have on the population rate, it would also have a positive effect in reducing cases of divorce arising from early marriage, provided that suitable monitoring mechanisms were put in place to ensure the effectiveness of such an amend­ment; there is also a need for monitoring of medical examinations of couples intending to marry.

lo.Personal status law should be amended to provide that women’s custody rights extend to the age of twelve for boys and fifteen for girls and may be extended to fifteen for the boy and the age of marriage for the girl if the judge considers this to be in the best interests of the child. This would considerably reduce the number of child custody disputes before the courts.