.... From evidence garnered on Sharia councils in London and Birmingham, Machteld argued that these were leading to 'marital captivity' - an important new addition to the legal lexicon - and called on the UK government to enact Dutch-style laws that allow women whose husbands refuse to grant religious divorce, to undertake civil or criminal proceedings.
The crossbencher Baroness Cox has proposed a bill which makes it illegal to treat the evidence of a man as worth more than that of a woman - which is the norm in Sharia councils and Muslim arbitration tribunals.
Also speaking was Dutch legal scholar David Suurland who pointed out that in 2003 and 2004, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that 'Sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy'.
He further argued that a laissez faire attitude to Muslim communities had allowed for Salafist and Islamist dialogues to operate beneath the criminal court in the Netherlands. The Dutch solution to this has been the monitoring of all Salafi organisations, in particular of rigorous checks on the sources of funding of new mosques from outside of Netherlands.
.... Therefore, in the interests of the better integration of Muslims and of a more socially cohesive society, the government must stop acceding to Muslim pleas for special treatment. [The Huffington Post UK] Read more
