Women’s rights organizations announced on Wednesday that MP Maha Abdel Nasser has adopted the draft Unified Law to Combat Violence Against Women and Girls and has begun procedures to place it on the House of Representatives’ legislative agenda during the upcoming parliamentary session. The move aims to address rising levels of violence affecting an estimated 8 million women and girls annually in Egypt, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics’ (CAPMAS) 2023 estimates.
The initiative is being led by the Unified Law to Combat Violence Task Force, a coalition of four leading rights and feminist organizations: Tadwein for Gender Studies, the Cairo Foundation for Development and Law, the Egyptian Women Lawyers Foundation, and the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA).
The coalition dates back to 2017, when the task force formed to draft a unified and comprehensive legislative proposal. It has previously succeeded in submitting the bill to parliament twice: first through MP Nadia Henry in 2018, and again through MP Nashwa El-Deeb in 2022.
Persistence despite frustration
Entisar El-Saeed, chair of the board of trustees of the Cairo Foundation for Development and Law, said the announcement marks the culmination of more than 10 years of fieldwork and intensive consultations with experts, rights advocates, and survivors to develop the draft law. She said the goal was not to produce legislation destined to remain in drawers, but to establish practical frameworks for protecting women.
A view of the conference attendees, July 8, 2026.Speaking at a conference announcing the initiative, hosted on Wednesday by CEWLA, El-Saeed said, “Our goal was to reach a unified law with a comprehensive vision that places prevention, protection, support, justice, and accountability within a single legislative framework, in light of the difficulties women currently face with fragmented legal provisions and having to navigate multiple authorities and multiple laws in search of protection, justice, and redress for victims.”
Addressing previous obstacles, El-Saeed said, “Despite the frustration the task force experienced when female MPs previously adopted the bill without it ever reaching the discussion stage in parliament, we remained determined to continue our work. We hope MP Maha Abdel Nasser will succeed in putting it on parliament’s agenda.”
In December 2024, feminist activists and female MPs criticized the lack of political will to enact a unified law to combat violence against women in Egypt, coinciding with international activities marking the campaign against gender-based violence.
At the time, former MP Nashwa El-Deeb said the draft law, which had secured the signatures of 60 MPs since she submitted it in March 2022, remained stalled in the office of the speaker of parliament without being referred to the relevant committees for discussion.
Details of the bill
The draft law, reviewed by Al Manassa, consists of 93 articles divided into four main sections covering general provisions and definitions, digital violence and sexual crimes, as well as protection measures and institutional governance for combating violence.
The bill provides for specialized protection mechanisms, including the establishment of dedicated prosecution offices and independent police units to receive complaints of violence against women at every police station. It also calls for the creation of a unified hotline that guarantees the confidentiality of complainants’ personal data and allows them to track the progress of their reports electronically.
The draft also includes measures to address cross-border crimes by linking the system to a shared database with Interpol to track perpetrators of crimes committed against Egyptian women abroad.
As part of reform and awareness efforts, the bill requires the Ministry of Interior to establish specialized prison units to rehabilitate perpetrators of violent crimes, while obliging the Ministry of Education to introduce a curriculum unit raising awareness of the dangers of violence and its impact on society.
On abortion, the bill exempts a pregnant woman from criminal liability for terminating a pregnancy without her partner’s consent if the abortion takes place within the first 120 days of pregnancy, provided there is a medical necessity or the pregnancy resulted from rape.
Crime evolves while legislation stands still
Heba Adel, a lawyer before the Court of Cassation and chair of the board of trustees of the Egyptian Women Lawyers Foundation, said the current version of the bill has been updated to keep pace with the continuing evolution of criminal methods.
She said the philosophy of the law is based on the principle that women’s rights are inherent rights rather than privileges, and seeks to provide comprehensive and effective protection that achieves general deterrence as a primary responsibility of the government.
The feminist lawyer said the proposed establishment of a National Fund to Support Victims of Violence is important because it would finance rehabilitation and protection services.
Speaking to Al Manassa on the sidelines of the conference, she also discussed provisions criminalizing child marriage, virginity tests, and marital rape. Regarding the ban on virginity tests, she said, “Current law criminalizes only the documentation process, but the practice itself remains socially permissible.”
A battle with no guarantees
Explaining why she adopted the bill, MP Maha Abdel Nasser stressed the seriousness of the spread of violence and its significant economic impact, citing 2015 data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics estimating the annual cost of intimate partner violence against women at approximately 1.49 billion Egyptian pounds.
She told the conference, “We’re not reinventing the wheel. Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon all have unified laws to combat violence against women. We’re not demanding anything unprecedented. I’ve decided to fight this battle in parliament regardless of the outcome—whether it succeeds or whether my name is added to the list of female MPs who tried before but were unable to bring it to debate.”
The MP said she had decided to remove the article criminalizing marital rape from the version being circulated among MPs for signatures to avoid jeopardizing the passage of the entire bill.
“I removed the marital rape article because it could obstruct the entire law in parliament and reduce the whole debate to that single article. The crime is already difficult to prove, and society will not accept it at all. But I certainly support criminalizing virginity tests conducted without legal basis because they constitute an unacceptable violation of Egyptian women.”
Speaking to Al Manassa on sidelines of the conference, Abdel Nasser said she remained determined to push the bill forward despite having no guarantees it would even reach the discussion stage.
“Demanding a unified law on violence is no longer a luxury. We urgently need it because the violence women face in Egypt has reached a dangerous level. What are you waiting for? A woman is killed every week in a different governorate. How much further do you want this to go?”
Harsher penalties are not the solution
Azza Soliman, chair of the board of trustees of the CEWLA, said during the conference that the bill’s punitive philosophy does not favor excessively harsher penalties or expanding custodial sentences, arguing that such an approach has proven ineffective in practice.
She cited the killing of student Nayera Ashraf, saying she was unconvinced that the death penalty or harsher punishment alone could achieve deterrence, noting that similar crimes had occurred afterward.
She said the priority should be holding executive institutions, including the Ministry of Interior, accountable for how they handled the victim’s reports of threats and requests for help before she was killed without any effective action being taken, criticizing some public institutions for normalizing violence against women instead of protecting them.
Meanwhile, Amal Fahmy, executive director of Tadwein, outlined the coalition’s joint advocacy strategy to promote the bill, saying the parliamentary announcement marks the beginning of a broader societal campaign.
She announced the preparation of a briefing paper titled “Why Do We Need a Unified Law to Combat Violence Against Women and Girls?” to serve as the main document for online and field advocacy campaigns. She also called on organizations and partner initiatives to join the campaign and host discussion sessions across different governorates to build public support for the bill’s adoption.
