KUALA LUMPUR, March 8 — The failure of Muslim men to fulfil their legal responsibility of providing for their wives and children financially is a top concern of those seeking free legal advice from Sisters in Islam’s (SIS) legal aid clinic Telenisa.
This issue of financial support for wives is such a big issue that it accounts for 32.5 per cent or 75 of the 576 cases handled by Telenisa in 2018, according to the latest statistics made available today.
Telenisa figures also show 52 per cent of the 267 cases relating to children at Telenisa in 2018 involved maintenance issues; with a further breakdown to fathers providing zero maintenance at 37.2 per cent or inadequate maintenance (20.9 per cent), fathers who are unemployed or have disappeared at both 10.2 per cent, and 8.1 per cent where fathers disobey court orders.
SIS programme manager Shareena Sheriff said it was not difficult to obtain court orders for fathers to pay maintenance for their children after a divorce as the law recognises such an obligation, but said the difficulty was in ensuring that they comply with the court order.
“The problem is that husbands don’t follow the court order, so what is there to do?
“So the wife has to go back to court to make sure the order is enforced, but that is not really effective. So the wife goes to and fro the court to ask for enforcement of the court order.
“In the meantime, the husband keeps ignoring the court order. So that is an issue that is very common, not just for Muslims, but also non-Muslims,” she said at the launch of SIS’s Telenisa Statistics and Findings 2018 booklet.
The booklet said such a process just to have the court order enforced is slow and imposes additional financial strain on the former wives as there are no penalties such as a fine or jailing for defaulting on maintenance, with many wives choosing to just give up their claim instead.
In the booklet, SIS said it welcomed minister in charge of religion Datuk Seri Mujahid Yusof Rawa’s recent announcement of the government’s plans to enable the Shariah court to claim from the ex-husbands’ contributions to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and bank accounts to pay for the wives and children’s maintenance if they fail to make such payments.
“We hope that the government will continue to develop policies and methods to ensure the children’s welfare in the case of a marriage breakdown remains of highest priority,” the booklet said.
Besides failure to pay maintenance after divorcing, there are also cases of husbands who fail to pay nafkah or maintenance to their wife for years during marriage, Shareena said.
Shareena noted that some husbands in Klang Valley may refuse to pay maintenance to their wives by citing the fact that the latter earn their own income as an excuse, but said husbands should instead take into account the wives’ limited income share in the future.
“We also understand that the standard of living is very high now, so you need double income family for many families living in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor,” she said.
Shareena pointed out that a wife’s right to matrimonial property would not be equal to her husband’s, and her right under faraid or Islamic inheritance law if the husband dies would be limited as compared to her son or her husband’s brother.
“But when you are limited in these areas of income, the issue of nafkah can’t be equal in that manner. The issue of financial stability to the wife in the family needs to be looked at holistically from that perspective,” she said.
For example, Islamic law on the division of a deceased Muslim man’s property allocates a smaller portion of the inheritance to his wife and his female children, in comparison to his male children.
Among other things, the booklet by Telenisa has statistics on and covers issues of divorces, polygamy cases, child custody, as well as property division or division of inheritance.
Telenisa, which was established in 2008, provides free legal advice to both men and women on their rights in relation to Islamic family law and the law on Shariah criminal offences.
