Morocco Makes Progress on Women’s Rights, but Guardianship Laws Still Restrict Mobility

Published on its website, the 119-page report, titled "Trapped: How Male Guardianship Policies Restrict Women’s Travel and Mobility in the Middle East and North Africa," examines 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa region and describes the various requirements imposed on women to obtain the permission of their male guardian to travel within their country, obtain a passport and travel abroad. HRW also examines whether women can travel abroad with their children as guardians on an equal footing with men. The defenders of these male guardianship policies in the region justify these rules out of concern for protecting women.

While some countries like Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have abolished the provisions on women’s obedience to their husbands, which led to restrictions on their movements, the organization notes that 15 countries in the region such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, continue to apply personal status or family laws that compel women to "obey" their husband, live with him or ask for his permission to leave the marital home, work or travel. Courts can order women to return to their marital home or lose their right to alimony, it is specified.

Noting that the 2004 Family Code has abolished the obligation for women to obey their husbands and instead provides that the husband and wife jointly manage the household affairs, following a campaign led by women’s rights activists who called for the recognition of Islamic concepts of respect and equality in marriage and that the 2011 Moroccan Constitution guarantees freedom of movement to all, including "the freedom to circulate and settle in the national territory, to leave it and return to it, in accordance with the law," Human Rights Watch notes, however, that other discriminatory provisions against women persist.

Despite the absence of a law, unaccompanied Moroccan women are prohibited from staying in hotels in the kingdom. Faced with the persistence of this discriminatory practice, the Minister of the Interior has, in July 2014 and again in September 2022, stated that his department has never given such instructions to hotels, the organization reports.