Women raise stakes for new constitution

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

AA photo

An association of women’s groups has demanded that Turkey’s new constitution guarantees equal status for husband and wife in the family and quotas for women in public offices.

Parliament’s Constitution Conciliation Commission received the demands from the Women’s Platform for a New Constitution, a group of women’s rights organizations led by the Association for the Support and Training of Women Candidates (KADER), as it continued to collect input from civic groups.

The group said the new constitution should support gender equality within the family and equal sharing of household duties, take up the woman as a free individual independent from the family and enforce positive discrimination. It also called for measures that would ensure equal representation for women in all political, administrative and judicial bodies and hold the state responsible for stamping out violence against women.