Turkey Revising Male-Dominated Code

Vying for membership of the European Union, Turkey is finally revising its 75-year-old civil code to advance women's rights. Parliament is scheduled to start debating a new draft code Wednesday, and the changes are expected to be voted on later this month.

To join the 15-member EU, a country has to be a democracy and have a free-market economy. It has to reform its legislation using an EU manual of tens of thousands of pages.

Some of the provisions of Turkey's old code - like the one requiring wives to seek their husbands' permission to work - are rarely invoked. But women's groups say the code was influential in shaping attitudes in the judiciary and among the public, especially in poorer rural areas.

"The old code was the husbands' code," said Nukhet Sirman of KADER, a group that aims to promote women in politics. "The new code, at long last, formally recognizes that men and women are equals."

If the changes are passed, they would take effect Jan. 1, 2002, after endorsement by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer.

Although women's groups say the new code can be improved further, they also welcome it for the advances it makes on the old code, which is virtually unchanged since it was adopted in 1926.

Turkey adopted its old code from Swiss family law, replacing the old Ottoman system which, for example, allowed a man to have more than one wife or to repudiate a wife who was no longer in favor.

"It was the most modern code of its time, but it has been eroded with time and no longer meets our social needs," said Kudret Guven, professor of law at Ankara's Gazi University.

The draft new code scraps the phrase "the head of the marriage union is the man," giving women the right to have a say in decisions concerning the children or the family home. She no longer needs a husband's consent to go out to work. But a person could ask his or her spouse not to take up a job that would disrupt "calm in the marriage union."

The code also ensures that women are better off in the event of a divorce, guaranteeing that all assets accumulated during the union are shared equally. Currently, a divorced woman is only entitled to assets legally registered under her name.

But men get improvements, too, under the new code.Men will be able to request alimony from wives who are better off. A man can also drop his own surname and take his wife's if he wishes, while the woman can use her maiden name only in connection with her husband's family name.

The new code also raises the legal age for marriage to 18 from the current 17 for men and 15 for women. It sets a legal separation period of six months before couples can file for divorce.

The code also lowers the legal age for adopting children from 35 to 30 and allows a single parent to adopt.

In a predominantly Muslim country where unmarried couples living together is still frowned upon, it makes no provisions for cohabiting families. It does, however, grant out-of-wedlock offspring the same inheritance rights as others.

It makes no mention of other 21st century issues such as surrogate motherhood or homosexual marriages.

"The code will probably have to be revised again in 10 or 15 years," said Ilknur Yuksel of the women's rights group Flying Broom. "But for the time being ... the draft is more or less adequate."