BEIRUT — Hundreds of protesters rallied outside Parliament in downtown Beirut Tuesday, April 1, as the Parliament voted to approve a domestic violence law that activists criticized for falling short of providing women full protection from abuse.

Women’s rights group Kafa denounced legislators for not considering a list of amendments they recommended to enhance the bill.

The new bill is too vague and allows abusers to get off the hook for crimes through loopholes, activists said.

“None of the amendments we made to the bill were discussed,” Zoya Rouhana, head of Kafa told reporters at a demonstration near the Parliament to protest the bill.

“They (MPs) just voted on the law and acted as if their job was done,” she said, adding that the group would now focus their efforts to campaign against the current parliamentarians in the next election later this year.

Protesters hung a banner showing portraits of the 128-member body, and then used their thumbs to smudge their faces with red ink regularly used for voting.

For Kafa’s Faten Abu Shakra, who helped organize the campaign, the law “does not specifically focus on women.”

She opposed the introduction “by religious men of religious language” into the bill, which fails to specifically refer to marital rape as a crime.

It criminalizes causing “harm,” including “beatings” and “threats,” to obtain sex, but the term “conjugal right” is used without mention of consent.

Ghassan Mkhayber, an MP who played a key role in lobbying for the law, said the term aimed to appease Lebanon’s powerful clerics, who had been opposed to the bill outright.

Human Rights Watch described the law as “good but incomplete” in a statement on Thursday.