Justice Likes a Woman?
nick cowen, 18 November 2008
A French appeal court has just overruled the decision by a lower French court taken in April of this year to annul a two-year old marriage on the grounds the bride had lied beforehand to her husband as to being a virgin.
Apparently, the bride confessed to her lie on their wedding night after blood failed to appear on the sheets of the bed in which they had consummated their marriage following the ceremony. In seeking an annulment, the husband claimed that he would not have married his wife had he known beforehand that she was not a virgin.
The basis for the original judicial decision was the court’s judgement that the woman’s lie had been about one of her ‘essential qualities’. Lies about attributes falling into this category prior to marriage constitute grounds for annulment in French civil law. In the past, French courts have deemed prior failure by a spouse to disclose a previous marriage, a child or having engaged in prostitution grounds for marital annulment. In reversing the decision, the French appeal court was effectively declaring the fact that someone is or is not a virgin is not as materially an important a fact about them as are these other matters.
The couple in the recent case were immigrants to France from north Africa. Within many parts of the Islamic world such as this, the virginity of marital partners at the time of their first marriage is taken very seriously indeed. A bride’s non-virginity is also widely considered there established by the same test as that to which the man in this case had recourse on his wedding night, despite admitting of both false positives as well as false negatives.
The apparent absence of a bride’s virginity as is revealed by this test can have literally devastating consequences for her, if getting married for the first time. As Jan Goodwin observes in her book Price of Honour: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World:
‘As with all Muslim brides, she is required to be a virgin. She is also required to prove it publicly. Even today, a white sheet daubed with her blood from the breaking of her hymen is passed among relatives the day after the wedding… This tradition is a disaster for the young woman who does not bleed, unless the couple choose to fake it. If there is any doubt whatsoever of an Afghan bride’s chastity, she will he immediately divorced and returned home to her family with the statement, “She was a woman, not a girl”, no matter what her age. Should that happen, the chances are high she will fall victim to fratricide.’
There is no suggestion that in the recent French case the woman concerned was or is in any such danger. Indeed, she apparently wanted the annulment as much as her husband and was as vexed as he that the original court’s decision had been appealed.
Hopefully, they will now be able to divorce and go their own way. But the case does signal the many difficulties that lie ahead for Europe as courts there seek to accommodate the mores belonging to some of the different cultures that have lately taken root there. More importantly, perhaps, the case forces Western liberals to recognise the impossibility of states assuming strict neutrality about matters of personal morality, however hard they might try. It is a sign, therefore, of interesting — read: difficult — times to come.