Legal Safeguards Resulting from Marital Disobedience

Abstract

The research seeks to identify the legal means by which the wife is protected from being subjected to any form of abuse and harm, and to specify the civil, family, judicial, and penal regulations applicable in cases of husbands committing acts of marital disobedience, and to compare the regulations of the two jurisdictions, Iraqi and Iranian. The significance of the present research lies in answering one of the family problems that the family faces today and negatively affects its stability and the wife’s rights, by revealing the effectiveness of the legal regulation on which both sides the husband and the wife should base themselves to achieve a lasting balance between maintaining the marital bond and protecting the wife from being tied to a situation in which she cannot exercise her rights. The research used the descriptive-analytical method through studying the legal texts, judicial documents, and jurisprudence, in addition to the comparative method to highlight the similarities and differences between the two countries in regulating marital disobedience and its legal consequences. The study has yielded several results; the most important of which is that neither Iraqi law nor Iranian jurisprudence and law consider the husband's recalcitrance to be an independent crime, but rather the legal effects of this phenomenon aimed at protecting the wife are imposed. In Iran, the reliance is greater on the concepts of good cohabitation, hardship, embarrassment, and gradualism in obliging the husband to perform his duties, while in Iraq it focuses more on the criterion of damage and judicial separation as a primary means of protection. It was also found that the judiciary plays a pivotal role in dealing with the effects of the husband's recalcitrance by obliging him to fulfill his marital rights or terminating the marital relationship if it becomes impossible to continue it. There is also the need to develop legal texts that give a more comprehensive and clear protection for the wife in facing different forms of recalcitrance.