Ending a marriage is rarely simple anywhere in the world, but in a handful of countries the process is shaped by something far more restrictive than paperwork and court dates. In these places, a woman’s path out of a marriage often runs through her husband’s consent, a male guardian’s signature, or a religious court built around centuries-old interpretations of family law. Meanwhile, men in these same countries can typically end a marriage with a spoken declaration and little to no judicial oversight.
These imbalances are not relics of the distant past. Several of the laws discussed below were amended, reformed, or tightened as recently as 2025, and the practical experience of women filing for divorce still lags far behind whatever text appears in the statute books. Here is a closer look at seven countries where a woman’s ability to leave her marriage remains tied, directly or indirectly, to a man’s approval.
1. Afghanistan
Since the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan has become the starkest example of male guardianship on the planet. Under the Taliban regime, women are required to have a male guardian, known as a mahram, for travel, education, and employment.[1] Women must also obtain permission from a male relative for medical treatment, even in emergencies.[1] Against that backdrop, the idea of a woman independently petitioning a court for divorce has become almost theoretical.
Courts that once handled family law cases under the previous Afghan republic have been reshaped or shuttered, and legal protections that briefly existed for women seeking to leave abusive or unwanted marriages have largely evaporated. These laws have severely restricted women’s rights and freedoms, leading to widespread international condemnation, and the situation in Afghanistan highlights the extreme end of male guardianship systems, where women’s autonomy is virtually non-existent.[1] For Afghan women today, a husband’s word carries more weight than any formal legal channel.
2. Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia’s 2022 Personal Status Law was the country’s first codified family law, and human rights researchers were quick to point out what it actually protected. Saudi Arabia’s first codified law on personal status, issued on International Women’s Day in 2022, formally enshrines male guardianship over women, and the law contains discriminatory provisions against women concerning marriage, divorce, and decisions about their children.[2] While a husband can unilaterally divorce his wife, a woman can only petition a court to dissolve their marriage contract on[2] narrower, more restrictive grounds.
A February 2025 update to the law’s implementing regulations introduced some adjustments, but the core imbalance remains. Filing for divorce is incredibly difficult for women in Saudi Arabia, since the law only permits a woman to obtain a divorce with her husband’s approval or if he has caused her harm.[3] While the codification of the Personal Status Law in 2022 introduced significant reforms and restrictions on this system, the guardian’s consent remained required in multiple areas, including the woman’s marital decisions and her divorce.[4] Men, by contrast, retain the unilateral right to talaq divorce without needing to justify their decision to anyone.
3. Iran
Iranian family law places enormous discretion in the hands of husbands and the judges who interpret their claims. Iranian law allows men to prevent their wives from traveling or taking up certain jobs, unless the woman obtains a power of attorney from her husband, either at the time of marriage or afterward, granting her the right to travel, work, or initiate divorce.[5] That single clause captures how thoroughly a woman’s legal independence in Iran can hinge on her husband’s willingness to grant it in writing.
Divorce petitions filed by women face a much longer and more uncertain road through the courts than those filed by men. According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, it is extraordinarily difficult for women to get a divorce in the Islamic Republic, with onerous conditions that are often impossible to meet and are at the discretion of the deciding judge, resulting in the woman losing financial maintenance and child custody.[5] The broader picture of gender inequality in Iran is reflected in global rankings too, since in 2024, Iran ranked 143 out of 146 countries assessed in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, reflecting the broad scope of gender-based legal inequality in the country.[6]
4. Yemen
Yemen’s Personal Status Law, first passed in 1992 and amended several times since, draws a sharp line between how men and women can end a marriage. A husband may unilaterally divorce his wife without reason, through verbally pronouncing the divorce declaration, whereas a woman may only obtain a divorce by resorting to court.[7] A wife’s only real shortcut around this imbalance is if her husband voluntarily hands her that power in advance, since a husband may delegate his unilateral right to divorce to his wife through a stipulation in the marriage contract, thus permitting her to pronounce divorce upon herself.[7]
Absent that arrangement, a Yemeni woman seeking a mutual-style exit through khul’ still cannot bypass her husband entirely. A woman may seek redemptive divorce, or khul’, by paying back the dower to the husband and forgoing all her financial rights, but a khul’ divorce requires the agreement of the husband, and there is no provision in the law to authorize a judge to rule for khul’ without the husband’s consent.[7] Even when a woman has legitimate grievances, years of war and institutional collapse have made functioning family courts harder to reach in much of the country.
5. Iraq
Iraq once had one of the more progressive personal status codes in the Arab world, but recent legislative changes have moved the country in the opposite direction. An amendment to Iraq’s Personal Status Law that entered into force on February 17, 2025, allows couples concluding a marriage contract to choose whether the Personal Status Law of 1959 or a Personal Status Code developed by the Shia Ja’afari school of Islamic jurisprudence would govern their marriage, divorce, children, and inheritance.[8] Rights groups warned from the start that this dual-track system would weaken protections that Iraqi women had relied on for decades.
Parliament went further in August 2025 by formally passing the Ja’afari-based code, and the practical effects on divorce were immediate. The new code allows husbands to divorce their wives without informing them or seeking their consent.[9] Women hoping to protect themselves in advance found little comfort in the fine print either, since the code allows a wife to stipulate in the marriage contract no polygamy or divorce without her consent, but if the husband breaches these obligations the marriage or divorce remains valid regardless.[10]
6. Jordan
Jordanian family law technically offers women more than one route out of a marriage, but each path carries its own obstacles. There are three ways to obtain a divorce in Jordan, a unilateral repudiation by the husband, a judicial divorce, or khul’.[11] In practice, the khul’ option still requires a woman to give up financial entitlements in exchange for her freedom, and judges retain wide latitude over whether her stated grounds for a judicial divorce meet the legal bar.
Guardianship customs also shape whether a woman can even reach a courtroom in the first place. In Jordan, authorities sometimes comply with requests from guardians to bar their daughters, wives, and children from leaving the country.[12] That kind of authority extends into daily life more broadly, since in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, male guardians and other family members can also report women to the police for being absent from their homes, which can lead to their arrest and forcible return home or administrative detention.[12] A woman weighing whether to leave her marriage has to weigh that risk too.
7. Lebanon
Lebanon has no unified civil family law at all. Instead, fifteen separate religious courts, Christian, Muslim, and Druze, each govern marriage and divorce for their own communities, and several of these frameworks give husbands outsized control over whether a separation is recognized. Some countries maintain family laws that consider women leaving the home, including traveling abroad, without their husbands’ permission as disobedience, and based on these laws they can lose their right to spousal maintenance from their husbands, and potentially can also impact their access to divorce and decisions relating to their children’s residence.[12]
The Maronite Christian courts offer a telling example of how these rules play out for real families. Two Lebanese women told Human Rights Watch in 2013 that they were advised by their local parish bishops not to leave their marital homes despite their husbands’ physical and emotional abuse, as the Maronite Court would consider their leaving an act of recalcitrance which could lead to their children being removed from their care.[12] More broadly, courts may use women’s disobedience to restrict women’s access to divorce and deny them financial rights or custody of their children.[12] For many Lebanese women, simply walking out the door can jeopardize the very divorce case they hoped to file.
