The personal status code turns seventy, and the loudest quarrel is over a category the notaries say does not exist
The Code of Personal Status was adopted on 13 August 1956. It banned polygamy, made consent a condition of marriage and put divorce before a judge. The anniversary falls in the middle of an open dispute. The president of the National Union of Tunisian Women says marriages concluded outside the Code are spreading, and has asked the public prosecution to check marriage contracts. The notaries answer that no such category exists in Tunisian law, and several of them want to take her to court. The other voices look past that quarrel. The feminist association ATFD presses for equal inheritance and wants the Code's discriminatory provisions repealed. An association that tracks femicides says the problem is not the text at all. And a journalist at Nawaat writes that the Code has been a balancing act since its first day.
Where they agree
Jerbi and Ben Mansour are openly at odds, yet both treat these unions as a matter for the law: he names the offence, she calls in the prosecutor. Dahmani and Boukhayatia stand apart from that fight and point at the same place in the Code: its unequal inheritance rules.
Where they split
They are not answering the same question. Jerbi and Ben Mansour disagree about what these unions are: she sees a social phenomenon, religious and unregistered unions spreading since 2011; he answers that no such legal category exists, only the offence of marrying outside the legal forms, and calls her account a distortion of the law. Dahmani and Boukhayatia look inside the text instead, at inheritance rules Dahmani wants repealed and Boukhayatia traces to the limits Bourguiba set for himself in 1956. Aswat Nissa answers a different question altogether: it counts thirty women killed in 2025, insists there must be no impunity, and the text of the Code appears nowhere in its account.
What nobody is saying
Nobody in this dispute says how many marriages are actually concluded outside a notary's office. Jerbi, who raised the alarm, admits as much herself.
At a press conference on 7 August she said religious and unregistered marriages outside the Code have spread since 2011: oral or written contracts that are never registered, and religious marriages involving foreigners. They are increasing, she said, even though no precise figures document them. She called the trend a continuing attack on the Code's gains, urged the public prosecution to move quickly to check marriage contracts, and has also called for some of the Code's articles to be reviewed.
He says Tunisian law recognises only one form of civil marriage: the contract a notary draws up, which is then officially registered. Terms such as customary or oral contracts, he says, spread notions that do not exist in Tunisian legislation, and he calls what was said at the press conference a distortion of the law that misleads public opinion. He rejects the attempts to implicate the notaries, to place them under supervision and to call in the public prosecution, and says a number of notaries are moving to take the union's president to court.
”جريمة التزوج على خلاف الصيغ القانونية”the offence of marrying contrary to the legal forms
At an international seminar in Tunis on 12 August, held for the Code's seventieth anniversary under the title Where do we stand on equality, she said the fight for a law establishing equal inheritance between men and women will go on, and that the association will keep raising it. The ATFD has long asked for a revision of the Code, she said: a pioneering text in the Arab and Muslim world that brought real advances, but one with gaps and discriminatory provisions that should be repealed.
The association counted 30 femicides in 2025, one more than in 2024, up from 25 in 2023 and six in 2018. It says femicide robs women of their lives and their dreams, and that the killings have continued into 2026. It insists there must be no impunity, and points to a state it sees as silent and slow to protect women from violence.
”صمت الدولة وتراخيها في حماية النساء من العنف”the state's silence and its laxity in protecting women from violence
She writes that the Code was fragile from birth: Bourguiba limited his own reinterpretation of Islamic law, in a balancing act with his conservative critics, and unequal inheritance rules and some moral provisions stayed in the text. The 1993 reform replaced the wife's duty of obedience with cooperation between spouses, a considerable advance, but a change of vocabulary, she writes, is not always enough to dismantle a patriarchal architecture. The Code's opponents change their arguments over time, from religion to moral order to national sovereignty, yet they converge on preserving the status quo at best and, at worst, on overturning the fragile balance the Code built.
”Le CSP s'est affranchi de la charia sans jamais la renier totalement.”The Code freed itself from sharia without ever wholly disavowing it.