A high court in Pakistan last week ordered a provincial government to remove gender-based age distinction in its child marriage law, a move aimed toward deterring forced conversions and compelled marriages of women, sources said.
Lahore High Court Justice Shahid Karim on April 15 declared as “discriminatory” Punjab Province’s Child Marriage Act of 1929, which fixed 18 and 16 years as legal ages for marriage for girls and boys respectively.
The verdict arose from petitioner Azka Wahid in search of amendments to the Child Marriage Act to avert harmful gender distinctions in accordance with the Constitution of Pakistan’s guarantee of equal rights for men and girls.
Justice Karim wrote in his five-page verdict that the several ages for marriage for male and females, “being unconstitutional, are held to be without lawful authority and of no legal effect. They are struck down.”
He directed the federal government of Punjab Province to “issue the revised version of 1929 Act (based on this judgment) inside the following 15 days and shall also upload that version on its website for information.”
Though the aforementioned law has been replaced by the Punjab Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Act, 2015 to criminalize child marriage in Punjab, women and girls in Pakistan are sometimes forced to marry against their will, in some cases even before reaching the legal age for marriage. This is very true for minorities similar to Christians and Hindus.
Christian and Hindu women and girls are particularly vulnerable as they belong to marginalized minority groups and are routinely targeted for sexual exploitation within the guise of forced marriages and compelled religious conversions, activists say.
The judge observed there was a must take effective steps against child marriages as Pakistan’s marriage laws were meant to primarily keep in view the “social, economic and academic aspects moderately than religious.”
Referring to Article 25 of the structure, the judge stated that each one residents were equal before the law and were entitled to equal legal protection.
“The definition of ‘child’ within the 1929 Act while making a distinction on the premise of age, shouldn’t be based on an intelligible criteria,” Justice Karim ruled. “The definition is indeed a special provision for the protection of girls, but in the method it tends to afford greater protection to males by keeping their age of marriage higher than females.”
The judge noted that a transient filed by the Punjab advocate general’s office made a reference to Islamic jurisprudence regarding the age of puberty as the standard interpretative toolkit. The report by the advocate general stated several aspects behind the laws, saying that in Pakistan, many children are victims of kid marriage, and the burden of kid marriage is disproportionately borne by girls versus boys.
The report says that early marriage excludes children from education and makes them vulnerable to numerous health complications. It points out that as many as 21 percent of women in Pakistan are married before the age of 18, and three percent before reaching 15, based on Unicef database 2016, based on Demographic Health Survey of Pakistan 2012-2013.
The report also quotes the recent Demographic Health Survey of Pakistan (2017-2018), which shows on average a rise within the age of women marrying, but in addition that child marriage on the age of 15 years has increased from 1.6 to 1.8 percent. Justice Karim observed that this made a compelling case to take effective measures to counter the debilitating effects of kid marriage.
“We, as a nation, woefully lag behind in all major indicators, and half of our population can’t be lost to child-bearing at an early age while its potential stays untapped,” the judge lamented.
He maintained that equal opportunities for females means equal restraint on marriage as for males. The judge further said the 1929 Act and its amendments help fulfill state duties under Article 35, which provides that it shall protect marriage, family, mother and child.
‘Right Direction’
Church leaders and rights activists welcomed the high court’s judgment, saying it had resolved the age difference issue and would assist in achieving a deterrent against forced faith conversions and compelled marriages of underage minority girls, including Christians.
Church of Pakistan President Bishop Azad Marshall lauded the decision, saying the Punjab government must amend the Child Marriage Restraint Act through the Punjab Assembly to implement the ruling.
“This verdict is step one towards recognition of the severity of the problems related to child marriages, especially those belonging to the minority Christian and Hindu communities,” Marshall told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News.
He said the church had been demanding the enforcement of a uniform minimum age for marriage for each girls and boys to be set at 18 years across Pakistan as a deterrent against forced conversions of underage Christian girls in guise of Islamic marriage.
Punjab Provincial Assembly’s Christian member Ejaz Alam Augustine said it was unlikely that the Punjab government would appeal against the court’s decision.
“I do not think the provincial government will challenge this decision because the amended Act will provide protection to all women and girls no matter their faith affiliations,” he said.
U.N. human rights experts on April 11 called on Pakistan to make legal changes in light of continued vulnerability of girls and girls of minority faiths to forced marriages and non secular conversions. The U.N. special rapporteurs called on Pakistan to lift the legal age for women to marry to 18 as a deterrent against exploitation within the 96-percent Muslim country.
“The exposure of young women and girls belonging to spiritual minority communities to such heinous human rights violations, and the impunity of such crimes, can now not be tolerated or justified,” they said in an announcement issued in Geneva.
The experts stressed that child, early and compelled marriages couldn’t be justified on religious or cultural grounds. They underscored that, under international law, consent was irrelevant when the victim was a baby under the age of 18.
At present Sindh Province is the just one in Pakistan where the legal marriage age for each girls and boys is eighteen years, while in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces, the minimum for women continues to be 16 years.
Pakistan ranked seventh on Open Doors’ 2024 World Watch List of probably the most difficult places to be a Christian, because it was the previous 12 months.
© Morning Star News
