The day when Supreme Court of India criminalized sexual intercourse by a husband with his wife who is under 18 years of age, Pakistan’s senate Standing Committee on Interior rejected a bill which suggested to increase the minimum age for girls to marry from 16 to 18, saying it was “contrary to Islamic injunctions”.
The bill, ‘The Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Bill, 2017’, was rejected by the chairman of the committee, Rehman Malik, by saying it was contrary to Islamic injunctions, reported Pakistan newspaper Dawn.
“I have also discussed it with religious scholars and they also believe that girls can be married before the age of 18 according to Islam, so these kinds of bills cannot be passed,” he announced.
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“Despite not being bound by procedure, parliamentarians normally ask the opinion of the Council of Islamic Ideology regarding certain bills. However, the council has been without a head for almost a year and cannot give an opinion. Parliamentarians have therefore been resorting to asking the opinion of Islamic scholars in their individual capacity,” reported Dawn.
The Indian Supreme Court’s decision is expected stop child marriage, which is still rampant in many parts of the country though it is illegal. In India, the legal age for girls to get married is 18. Nearly 12 million Indian children were married before the age of 10 – 84% of them Hindu and 11% Muslim, said a study in India Spend.
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Senator Kamran said Pakistani citizens are not issued Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC) and driving licences before the age of 18 and that they are also not allowed to vote. Then how can they be allowed to marry before that, she asked.
“Girls as young as 10 are being married off in Pakistan even though the legal minimum age for getting married is 16 and this is because they do not get their CNICs made. That is why I suggested the minimum age for getting married be raised to 18. If the government thinks 16-year-old girls are adults, they should also be issued driving licenses and allowed to cast votes,” Ms Kamran said.
The Senator said that because of the vague law, pre-teen girls are being married off to men four times their age and that due to this, they are deprived of an education, get physically weak and develop complications from early pregnancies, some even resulting in death.
The draft bill, available with Dawn, says the leading cause of death for girls between the ages of 15 and 18 is pregnancy. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child also suggests the minimum age for marriage should be 18.
The practice of marrying off young girls is common in Pakistan, particularly in low-income families but action cannot be taken against offenders and that the minimum age should therefore be increased to 18.
