Cohabitation Bill [HL]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lester, for introducing this Bill. I speak as a Muslim woman and declare an interest as the chair of the Muslim Women’s Network. However, here I speak in an entirely personal capacity as someone who, through training and culture, has never cohabited and who, some 30 years ago, had the good fortune to find the only man in the world who could survive being married, and staying married, to me. I feel that Muslim women—in particular, in this country and particularly those who are in a polygamous marriage—suffer enormously because they have no protection. In this respect, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, that they should make a contract and that they should choose to be married. As a matter of fact, in both cases they do. In Islam, marriage is a matter of contract in which women are paid—they are entitled to payment for consenting to the marriage. I am sorry, but I find that in no way unromantic. I always thought it was essential that someone realised that I was worth a great deal and agreed to pay. Women also have the right to maintenance, to wages for housework and to payment for suckling their babies. Therefore, in that sense, all women in formal marriages who choose to work within the household are recognised as a matter of course as being in paid employment. However, we have an enormous problem in that those rights are not necessarily transferable across borders or nations or, unfortunately in this country, across cultures. That is the real problem for Muslim women. If their marriage is registered—it is compulsory in Iran to register all formal marriages—that registration remains, for example, in Pakistan but is not transferred to the UK when they arrive as someone’s bride. They assume that they have a range of entitlements but their husbands may suddenly decide to bring in another woman. In the case of the marital contract in Iran, women are required to give their consent to a second marriage, and they can decide where they live and so on. However, none of these rights is transferred when they come to this country, and therefore any Muslim woman is at any point vulnerable to finding a second woman brought in, willy-nilly, by her husband, who does not register the second marriage either and can bring in a third and a fourth wife. There is much discussion among Muslims across the world as to whether men have a Koranic right to marry even a second wife. As I said, in Iran it is accepted that the only way that a second wife can be admitted to a household is with the legal written consent of the wife. However, in this country, the absence of registration and of recognition of the legally agreed entitlement of married Muslim women means that some women are more married than others. You can have women who are recognised, registered and entitled to a pension, inheritance, a house and so on, and in the same household there may be women with no rights whatever. Furthermore, under a Muslim contract, at the point of marriage a woman can decide whether she is going to share in the wealth of her husband and, even more importantly, whether her husband has any right to her wealth. One problem experienced by professional Muslim women who are married in this country informally is that their husbands may well claim their rights, particularly if these women are not familiar with the laws of the land or the language when they come in and the husband registers what they bring in as his wealth. It is very difficult to protect women who, in good faith, have entered into a contract that is supposed to give them security and protection but, when they arrive here, they become dispossessed citizens. Also problematic is the fact that, as their marriages are not registered, they have nothing to work with in their own defence. Of course, there is an extensive group of women who work within communities in this country who are trying very hard to ensure that the women who come in without any kind of protection have some support. In the Muslim community it is difficult to go against kinship norms and survive. We are raised to depend on our families and to protect our families and we are raised not to speak against them. To start a campaign to protect second and third wives, who are enclosed in families who do not respect their rights, is not easy. It is certainly not easy to register their children. In one household, you can have children who are legally recognised as the children of the husband and in the same household you can have children from the same man who have no rights to inheritance, no entitlement and are not recognised as legitimate children of the household, even though the wife, in good faith, assumes she is the wife of the man. That inequality should not be tolerated. I very much wish that we could insist on the registration of all marriages. At least, that would deal with the free choice that those women have made. To me, it is unacceptable that citizens born in this country are not recognised as the lawful children of their fathers, when their mothers had assumed, in good faith, that they would be. I very much hope that the Bill will be recognised.