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Understanding the marital rights of Assyrian women: a radical feminist examination of legal promises and protections made under Iraq's 2005 Constitution Jonathan Toma (6157130) PUREID: 454620920 This thesis aims to understand the marital rights of Assyrian women in Iraq through taking a radical feminist examination of the legal promises and protections made under the 2005 Constitution. Prior to the 2005 Constitution, Assyrian women’s marital rights were only protected by Iraq’s commitment to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and a limited amount of Provisions found within Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law. However, with the introduction of the 2005 Constitution, Assyrian women were not only recognised as an ethnoreligious minority for the first time in history, they were also protected under Article 41’s personal status guarantee. Although such progressive steps for Assyrian women, the 2005 Constitution stipulated that no laws were to go against the teachings of Islam, with any divergence being seen as a violation of the law, a factor which had never been seen in any previous Constitution’s (Article 2, 2005 Constitution of Iraq, p. 4). As a result of this stipulation, the Constitutional failures uncovered in this thesis will conclude that with Islam’s supremacy and its ability to be loosely interpreted, leading to religious inconsistencies and integration issues, Assyrian women have rarely ever been able to have had their legal promises and protections granted to them by any of Iraq’s legal frameworks, with further challenges ahead of them in remedying these legal promises. 2026-10-01T16:53:54Z Text Thesis 10.17034/32634639.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Understanding_the_marital_rights_of_Assyrian_women_a_radical_feminist_examination_of_legal_promises_and_protections_made_under_Iraq_s_2005_Constitution/32634639 All Rights Reserved