User:DonicaS/sandbox

BANI MUSTAPHA, Wafa

Jordanian political figure, lawyer and human rights activist from Souf. Born in 1979.

In October 2021, Bani Mustapha became Minister of State for Legal Affairs.

Wafa Bani Mustapha started her political career early. In 2010, age 31, she became the youngest Member of Parliament ever electedVoices of Jordan, Rana Sweis, 2018. She was initially elected under Jordan’s 15-seat quota for women in the Lower House and served for a full four-year term. In 2014, she competed outside the quota, winning her seat despite the additional hurldes of being a female politician in a country where this is relatively rare. She served three consecutive terms in Parliament.

Bani Mustapha was the first woman to head a bloc in the Jordanian parliament and also served as Chairperson of the Order and Conduct Committee and as a member of the Public Freedom and Human Rights Committee as well as the National Media and Orientation Committee. RASED, a Jordanian NGO, ranked her among the top five best performing parliamentarians twice, in 2016 and 2017.

On the regional and international stage, Bani Mustapha represented Jordan in the Women’s Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly Union for the Mediterranean and was a founding member of the Climate Parliamentary Network and the Arab Parliamentary Forum for Development and Population. In 2018. She was elected Vice Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) Standing Committee on Sustainable Development, Finance and Trade, representing the Arab Group.

In Parliament, Bani Mustapha was known as a strong advocate for improving women’s rights. In December 2013, she proposed the repeal of Article 308 of Jordan’s Penal Code, which allowed rapists to avoid legal sanction by marrying their victims.Al Jazeera English, 4Aug2017 article by Zena Al Tahhan. The so-called “marriage rape law” was finally repealed in August 2017. She also called for amendments to the Residency and Foreign Affairs Law to allow residency for the children of Jordanian women married to non-Jordanians and lobbied to include a new article in the Penal Code to criminalize sexual harassment.

Bani Mustapha left Parliament after the election of 2019. She founded the Jordan Masarat for Development and Progress www.masarat.jo.

In 2021, Bani Mustapha was appointed by H.M. King Abdullah to sit on a 92-person Political Reform Commission. In that role, she advocated forcefully for better access for women to political life, including greater opportunities for women to sit in Parliament and for the mandatory inclusion of women in political parties and on election candidate lists.

She was subsequently appointed Minister of State for Legal Affairs in October 2021. Her priorities initial have included overseeing legislation to translate the recommendations of the Political Reform Commission into law.