Mogadishu Somalia Magazine -Days after his deputy Sadiya Yasin Samatar committed to support a revised law against sexual assault, the speaker of Somalia’s Lower House of Parliament, Sheikh Adan Madobe, declared that he would not endorse any law that discriminated against the Islamic faith.
There is no gender-related legislation before the parliament, the Parliamentary Speaker, who was presiding over a combined meeting of the two chambers of the parliament, made plain. He claimed to not have implemented any laws that were anti-religious to the parliamentary committee.
According to Adan Madobe, opposition leaders are disseminating “false news,” but that doesn’t warrant a response.
Only a few days prior to Madobe’s comments, Sadiya Yasin Samatar, the first deputy speaker of parliament, predicted that a bill prohibiting sexual assault will soon be passed by the legislature.
When Somalia’s parliament replaced the Sexual Offences Bill (SOB), which had been sitting in the Lower House of parliament for more than two years, with the Sexual Intercourse Bill in 2020, it drew worldwide ire. The latter was criticized for not going far enough to safeguard the rights of women and girls. The UN pleaded with Somali legislators to reject the proposal.
High-ranking legislators in the previous legislature contended that the SOB measure violated Islamic law and that its ambiguous phrasing encouraged same-sex relationships.