STRASBOURG, France - Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed Saturday to keep "enormous pressure" on the government of Afghanistan to ensure women's rights in that country are respected.
"The alliance is not prepared to accept soothing assurances," Harper said as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization wrapped up a two-day summit.
At issue are reports of a law, signed by President Hamid Karzai but not yet public, which makes it illegal for Shia women to deny sex to their husbands.
It is intended to regulate family life inside Afghanistan's Shia community, which makes up 10 per cent to 20 per cent of the country's 30 million people.
The law has caused an international furor, including in Canada, which has lost 116 soldiers and spent billions of dollars in Afghanistan.
Karzai, facing elections this summer, said during a news conference Saturday in Kabul that the law will be studied and possibly sent back to parliament for review.
One of the law's most controversial articles legislates the frequency of sexual relations between Shia husbands and wives. Article 132 says the husband has a right to sex every fourth night unless the wife is ill.
Karzai did not mention Article 132, but said he had studied the law earlier in the day and that "I don't see any problems with it." He also complained that Western media outlets had mistranslated it.
But human rights activists say the law legalizes the rape of a wife by her husband and international observers suggest it is part of Karzai's re-election campaign among deeply religious segments of the Shia population.
U.S. President Barack Obama called the law "abhorent" on Saturday, but Harper went further.
"The equality of men and women goes to the heart of our values system and our engagement in that country and our opposition to the Taliban and the Taliban government," said the prime minister.
Harper made a strong intervention on the issue during the closed-door NATO hearings, according to Canadian and American officials.
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's outgoing secretary general, had very publicly warned in advance of the summit that such a law would cripple the alliance's efforts to muster more military support from an already reluctant European public.
While the NATO summit indeed failed to produce a dramatic increase in European combat troops for the Afghanistan mission, Harper suggested the controversy over the law was not a pivotal factor.
"I would say that this issue did not interface directly with the issue of troop commitment," said the prime minister.
"What I would point out though is that the countries that were most vocal about this law, and how troubled we are by it, were for the most part the countries who are the most engaged and the most robustly engaged in Afghanistan."
"So I think the message to the Afghan government here is unmistakable."
With files from The Associated Press
