A new and vanguard Lebanese court ruling to protect women from moral violence

The Legal Agenda published last month a report about a court ruling issued by Judge Ralph Karkabi on 18-3-2014 and which prevented a man from posting pictures of his wife lest he is penalised an amount of USD 20,000 for every picture posted or leaked in any way.  The case is that of a man married to a woman for 16 years during which he took intimate pictures with her consent.  However, when their relation deteriorated, he threatened to publish the pictures so that he can annul the marriage and accuse her of adultery.
According to the author, lawyer Nizar Saghieh, this decision is important since it recognises the harm caused by moral violence which is even more dangerous than physical violence as is the case of this woman since such actions would have jeopardised her future especially that posting intimate pictures of women is indeed a form of violence which harms women's dignity and their social and family standing.  Saghieh further considers that this judgment is in opposition to the current format of the domestic violence protection bill as endorsed by the parliamentary commissions in July 2013 and which failed to recognise moral violence (including marital rape, forced sex, attack of women's dignity, etc...) from the definition of violence and restricted the implementation of the law to certain specific cases only.
Saghieh notes that this court ruling paved the way for recognising the role that the judiciary can play especially in the creation of new jurisprudence in the absence of laws protecting women from violence.  Such court orders will protect women until a suitable law is endorsed.
Saghieh also notes that this court order follows two previous ones by Karkabi and Antoine Tohme within the framework of protecting a woman and her daughter from violence exercised by her ex husband.  These court orders which were endorsed by the highest judicial authority, namely the Supreme Court (or Court of Cassation), emphasize a new legal principle namely that individual safety takes primacy over anything else thus creating new opportunities for protecting women from violence.
Source: http://www.legal-agenda.com/newsarticle.php?id=616&folder=legalnews&lang=ar#.UzqH3c7Z7xU">Legal Agenda 20 March 2014