TITLE:
Committee on the Woman, Family and Childhood in the Iraqi Parliament (Observation and Assessment)
AUTHORS:
Inass Abdulsada Ali, Sana Kadhem Qati, Batool Hussain Alwan
KEYWORDS:
Parliamentary Committees, Iraqi Parliament, Committee on the Women, Fam-ily and Childhood
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Political Science,
Vol.8 No.3,
July
17,
2018
ABSTRACT: When
the Iraqi parliament was formed after 2003, women had their share in this
importance, as they were present always in the conducts of the newborn political
process in Iraq due to the political democratization. Soon after the first
legislative elections occurred in 2005, lights were shed on naming and forming
committees, one of which was a committee on the woman, family, and child, which
was renamed afterward into committee on the woman, family, and childhood. By
observing the work of this committee in two legislative sessions, this research
is aimed at introducing a pioneering study in this field for its importance and
the rarity of similar studies that tackled it directly. The paper will
recognize the committee’s role and response to issues within its range of
responsibilities, especially women’s issues, and answers two significant
questions: is the committee activated or deactivated? And is it active or
inactive? Our paper tries to confirm the authenticity of its presumption which
is “Committee on Woman, Family, and Childhood is considered inactive because
it is deactivated due to the number of draft laws that were suggested through
the two parliamentary sessions and its capability of passing some of them”. Our
qualitative and quantitative approaches relied on using documents analysis tool
such as parliament basic system, internal committee regulations and parliament
sessions’ proceedings that discussed draft laws suggested by the committee,
etc. We also made direct interviews with members of the committee in the
previous and the current sessions of parliament. But there lie a lot of
difficulties in the face of these plans; for example, chairman of the committee
in second legislative sessions canceled an appointment with the researchers,
after we went to meet her on time in that appointment.