GREECE'S SHARIAH LAW OPTIONS FOR MUSLIMS

ATHENS: The Greek Parliament on Tuesday made the practice for Islamic Shariah Law in family disputes optional for the country's Muslim minority, changing a century old legacy.

Greece's leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras immediately called the vote an ''historic step'' as it  ''extended equality before the law to all Greeks.''

The legislation will allow Muslims litigants to opt for a Greek court to resolve family disputes rather than appealing to Islamic jurists known as muftis.

FOR FAMILY law matters. Greek Muslims generally seek recourse to muftis for things like divorce, child custody and inheritance.

Rights group say that it is a system that frequently discriminates against women.

The issue has its origins in the period after World War 1, and treaties between Greece and Turkey that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The 1920 Treaty of Sevres and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne stipulated that Islamic customs and Islamic religious law would apply to thousands of Muslims who suddenly became Greek citizens.

Greece's roughly 110,000 strong Muslim minority lives in Thrace, a poor rural region in the northeast bordering Turkey.

The parliament's move comes as the European Court of Human Rights [ECHR] is expected to rule this year on a complaint brought against Greece by a 67-year-old widow:

Hatijah Molla Salli, who is locked in an inheritance dispute with her late husband's sisters.