DOHA: A legal expert has urged the government to establish a corpus from which divorced women with children under their legal custody could be provided with funds to support themselves until their ex-husbands pay them alimony (alimony).
The expert said such a fund is necessary because divorced people with no income and children have problems with their custody as long as they are not paid alimony.
Divorce and custody cases take time because family law does not have its own procedural law.
Then litigants appeal, which means cases can be long-pending and the wives and children in their legal custody receive no alimony until resolution.
Sonia Malak, from the University of Qatar Law College, told a symposium that there is an urgent need for a state-backed corpus to support the divorced and children under their legal custody until they start receiving alimony.
Their ex-husbands can be tricked into repaying alimony given to them, and to do so, a court must deduct money from their wages or garnish their assets.
“Money from the state corpus to be given to the divorced and their children should be treated like a loan,” Malak said.
The repayment of loans by ex-husbands should be criminalized so that a husband can be imprisoned if he fails to comply.
The symposium was hosted by the Legal Studies Center of the Department of Justice. Its head, Mariam Arab, said the Family Law No. 22 of 2006 did not have a separate procedural law, resulting in the courts taking a long time to settle cases of divorce, inheritance and child custody.
A procedural law is all about due process, or the rules by which a court hears and determines what happens in a legal dispute. In the absence of a procedural law for family law, civil procedural law applies to the resolution of family-related legal disputes.
Experts at the symposium also described the method of subpoenaing the parties to the dispute as archaic. “We need to think about making appropriate changes to the system,” said Mohsin Al Qadi of the Court of Appeal.
Subpoenas in family and marital disputes are formulated in general terms. For example, the party to the dispute is summoned to court without a reason being given. “There is a need to state in a subpoena that ‘you are needed in court in a divorce case filed by your spouse,'” Al Qadi gave an example. When it comes to child custody, it should be mentioned in a subpoena, he added.
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