This is a followup about one of the comments I got in my posts. A commentor objected that the reason the opposition want to go back to the constitution is because it does not allow women to vote and run for parliament, and that it does not explicitly state that women are equal to men with respect to their rights in the constitution. A similar debate was going on in Mahmood's blog, and I was part of it.

Now I seemed to remember that the 1973 constitution did explicitly mention women as equal to men, and that the reason women did not get to vote and run in elections back then is because of a an royal decree ("marsoom beqanoon"). Since our old constitution was based on the Kuwaiti constitution, I assumed that the reason women couldn't vote in Bahrain is similar to the one in Kuwait, and that it is because of a law issued rather rather than something in the constitution. I Hence, I was perplexed, and decided to investigate this old constitution. I mean, this is a pretty big issue, and if the old constitution does indeed specifically bar women from voting or being represented, it would be a huge drawback.

So I looked up a lot of different sources (to avoid accusations of impartiality and of the constitution being doctored) of the 1973 Bahraini Constitution written in Arabic. What I found was as I suspected, the word "aljins", or sex, definitely appears in Article 18 of the 1973 constitution (I've inserted the bold font):

مادة (18)

الناس سواسية في الكرامة الإنسانية ، ويتساوى المواطنون لدي القانون في الحقوق والواجبات العامة ، لا تميز بينهم في ذلك بسبب الجنس أو الأصل أو اللغة أو الدين أو العقيدة.

An exact translation of the above is:

Article 18:
People are equal in human dignity, and citizens shall be equal in public rights and duties before the law, without
discrimination as to gender, race, origin, language, religion or belief.

This is exactly the same as article 18 of "door" (bab) 3 which appears in the new 2002 constitution:

مادة (18)

الناس سواسية في الكرامة الإنسانية، ويتساوى المواطنون لدى القانون في الحقوق والواجبات العامة، لا تمييز بينهم في ذلك بسبب الجنس أو الأصل أو اللغة أو الدين أو العقيدة.

Translation:

Article 18:
People are equal in human dignity, and citizens shall be equal in public rights and duties before the law, without
discrimination as to gender, race, origin, language, religion or belief.

Now I was extremely perplexed, to say the least, about the claims being made that the old constitution does not support women equality like the new one does, since the articles are exactly the same. However, I looked up an english translation of the old 1973 constitution, and low and behold, Article 18 reads:

Article 18:
People are equal in human dignity, and citizens shall be equal in public rights and duties before the law, without
discrimination as to race, origin, language, religion or belief.

The word gender has magically disappeared out of the English translation of the old constitution! However when one looks at the English translation of the new constitution, the word gender is there:

Article 18:
People are equal in human dignity, and citizens shall be equal in public rights and duties before the law, without
discrimination as to gender, race, origin, language, religion or belief.

What's going on here? Now I assume the original document of the old constitution was written in Arabic, so the word "aljins" is definitely there. Who is this person who translated it though? We can't even trust people to translate a document properly!

Anyway, does anyone have access to 100% verifiable documents of the English and Arabic versions of the old constitution? I could only find four links on the web to the 1973 Arabic text, and three of these were from what can be termed "opposition" websites (funny how the parliament's website didn't have a copy of it, something to hide?). If anyone has any other links, so as to address the skeptics, could you please post them? Also, if anyone has contacts with authoritative people to ask about this issue, it might be important to find out. I mean, this is a huge issue, and I'm just surprise that no one seems to have pointed it out before!

Links to Arabic Text of 1973 constitution:
link 1
link 2
link 2
link 3

Links to English Texts of the 1973 constitution:
link 1
link 2

Links to Arabic Texts of the 2002 constitution:
http://link 1
link 2

Links to English Texts of the 2002 constitution:

link 1
link 2

¶ 6:39 PM