Misinformation and Budget Cuts Complicate Debate Over Morocco’s Family Law Reforms

As the United Nations’ 70th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York concludes, global leaders continue to highlight a persistent gap between commitments and action on women’s rights worldwide. The stark reality remains that women hold only 64% of the legal rights men enjoy globally, with 44% of countries still not mandating equal pay.

“We no longer need to debate why women’s rights matter. The facts are clear,” said Annalena Baerbock, President of the UN General Assembly. “The real question is: why are we still not delivering?”

Against this challenging global backdrop, Morocco finds itself at a crucial juncture as reforms to its family code, known as the Moudawana, have stalled in parliament. The reform process faces multiple obstacles: widespread misinformation, limited public debate, and uneven implementation of past reforms.

Since gaining independence, Morocco’s Moudawana has undergone three significant reform phases – in 1957, 1993, and most notably in 2004. The 2004 revision introduced sweeping changes, including raising the legal marriage age to 18, expanding women’s divorce rights, and improving child custody laws.

However, the impact of these reforms has been inconsistent. Child marriage, while legally restricted to “exceptional” cases under the 2004 code, continues at concerning rates. Judges approved approximately 64% of the 16,790 child marriage requests submitted in 2024 – a decrease from 85% in 2018, but still alarmingly high.

In September 2023, two decades after the last major overhaul, King Mohammed VI called for another revision of the family code. This prompted the Moroccan women’s rights group Mobilizing for Rights Association (MRA) to propose eliminating exceptions that allow child marriage.

Stephanie Willman Bordat, founding partner of MRA, explained to Morocco World News that implementation barriers have plagued all three previous reforms. “Not even judges and lawyers were fully informed,” she said, highlighting the slow rollout of past changes. “There wasn’t a real dialogue or widespread understanding of what had changed.”

Ambiguities in the 2004 law itself contributed to confusion: “You could read it one way or another,” she noted. Illiteracy presented another major hurdle, particularly in rural areas, with roughly half of Moroccan women unable to read at the time of the last reforms. Even for literate populations, complex legal texts remained difficult to interpret.

Language further complicated matters. Much of the public debate around the 2004 reforms took place in classical Arabic, which large segments of the population do not widely understand.

In response to these challenges, Moroccan NGOs launched extensive grassroots campaigns, using theater, community workshops, and legal education programs to explain the 2004 Moudawana. MRA developed a comprehensive facilitator manual with support from USAID and trained local groups to provide accessible information about the legal changes.

Debates around the Moudawana are often framed as a clash between religion and modernity – a simplification that experts say obscures the real issues at hand.

“We sometimes find dominant patriarchal interpretations of religious texts that see male superiority, authority, and guardianship over women as a sacrosanct religious edict that must be followed by law,” explained Marwa Sharafeldin, Senior Adviser to Musawah, during the 2026 CSW session.

Such interpretations have fueled resistance to reform in Morocco. During both the 2004 changes and the proposed 2024 reforms, misinformation spread widely, with claims that men would lose religiously sanctioned rights such as polygamy or financial authority.

“I don’t want to overestimate the opposition, but those who did oppose the reforms were spreading fake news,” Willman Bordat said. “People tend to get defensive and upset if they think something they consider a right is under attack. A lot of what people thought they were losing weren’t rights—they were privileges.”

The current reform process faces additional challenges in an era where news and misinformation spread rapidly on social media. Crucially, no official draft of the new Moudawana has been publicly released, though the Higher Council of Ulemas approved several key proposed reforms in late 2024 while rejecting others deemed incompatible with established religious texts.

Unlike in 2004, when NGOs played a central role in public education, today’s reform process is unfolding amid shrinking support for local movements. International funding for women’s rights initiatives has declined significantly, limiting organizations’ ability to conduct outreach and education campaigns.

“All the funding for women’s rights got cut after the US administration cut USAID last year. Then many European governments followed suit,” Willman Bordat explained. “The reason there’s no public debate now is simple: there’s no funding.”

This funding decline has serious consequences: fewer grassroots initiatives, reduced access to reliable information, and a growing social media vacuum increasingly filled by misinformation.

As global leaders question why progress on women’s rights continues to stall, Morocco’s experience offers a clear lesson: legal reform alone is insufficient. Without access to accurate information and sustained support for local movements, public discourse stalls and misinformation thrives.

“Everyone talks about awareness,” Willman Bordat emphasized. “But this is about access to information. The government has the responsibility to inform people of their rights.”