Access To Justice
committee; quotas for the election of women in parliament have been eliminated in the upcom- ing election; and only one woman minister has been appointed by the transitional government. With the rise of conservative parties, gains made on family law legislation and on legislation on vio- lence against women (identified with the previous regime and Suzanne Mubarak in particular) are at risk. She expressed concern over whether revo- lutions will advance access to justice and gender equality, especially if the dominant party or major- ity party post-revolution is conservative.28
Govern-
ment efforts to forestall unrest, however, may be progressive in the sense of granting greater rights to women, such as the Saudi King’s recent deci- sion to give women the right to vote in municipal elections.
26
The problem of implementation of progressive leg- islation was a recurrent theme of the conference, as all panelists agreed that legal change, by itself, is not the same as cultural, social or behavioral change. As a scholar on issues relating to Moroc- can women and other matters wrote, “[w]ithout changing attitudes, there will still be cultural resis- tance to equality.”29
By way of comparison, several
panelists observed the difficulties in desegregation of the American South following the desegrega- tion decision by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in light of Southern opposition.30
“Sometimes,” as Mr. Zulfiqar noted,
“the law is ahead of the people.” He added, how- ever, that this may not be such a concern, since after awhile, people tend to put aside their prob- lems with the progressive laws (even if they were at one time ahead of their views) and, again refer- encing the American South, “accept such law as part of their new reality and comply.”
Conclusion
Panel discussions are sometimes part of an in- tellectual framework involving large questions as well as small, and this was true here. One large question touched on but not fully answered by the
panel implicitly concerned which form of govern- ment is best and most likely to be successful for the region. Professor Francis Fukuyama, observ- ing the complexity of the question in a universal setting, has written that it depends, among other things, on the context:
[A] political system that works well for a rapidly growing country whose popu- lation’s median age is in the twenties may not work so well for a stagnant society where a third of the citizenry is at retirement age. If the institution fails to adapt, the society will face crisis or collapse, and may be forced to adopt another one. This is no less true of a liberal democracy than of a nondemo- cratic political system.31
Although authoritarian systems may be more ef- ficient in certain respects (given benevolent lead- ership) compared to modern democracies, Pro- fessor Fukuyama has expressed the concern that “contemporary democracies become too easily gridlocked and rigid, and thus unable to make diffi- cult decisions to ensure their long-term economic and political survival.”32
Professor Fukuyama added
that in the long-term, however, authoritarian sys- tems have vulnerabilities which make them a poor choice:
An authoritarian system can periodical- ly run rings around a liberal democratic one under good leadership, since it is able to make quick decisions unencum- bered by legal challenges or legislative second-guessing. On the other hand, such a system depends on a constant supply of good leaders; under a bad em- peror, the unchecked powers vested in the government can lead to disaster.33
Systems with “political accountability,” he ob- served, will likely “prevail over ones without it. Political accountability provides a peaceful path to- ward institutional adaptation.”34
Although the situ-
ation is still evolving, one of the greatest strengths of the Arab Spring is the extent to which it has appeared to move countries in the region in that direction.
ILSA Quarterly » volume 20 » issue 2 » December 2011
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