‘Landmark legislation aimed at ending early marriages in Sindh being poorly implemented’

Although the Sindh government takes credit for becoming the country’s first elected assembly to have passed a bill on child marriages in April 2014, which places a ban on marriage of children under 18 years and makes its a violation punishable with rigorous imprisonment of up to three years, sadly the law is still poorly implemented, said rights activists.

The Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act 2013, a landmark piece of legislation, is aimed at ending early marriages in Sindh.

The issue of the implementation of the law restraining child marriages has once again been in the limelight and is being hotly debated by different circles after the emergence of alleged cases of forced conversions in rural Sindh.

On Sunday, a meeting of rights activists from across the province gathered in Khairpur to discuss the implementation and the enactment of new laws to protect religious minorities and again recommended the government to strictly implement the child marriages law.

Fareeda Tahir, an official working at the Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO) in Karachi, said child marriage destroys society as a whole as well as the life of a girl. “It deprives her of education, right to development and growth and exposes her to health risks and gender-based violence,” she told The News.

She said that the issue was from both sides – government and society. “The government lacks priority to address women issues. The government notified district-level monitoring committees, but in fact they are not functional,” she said.

Tahir said that social norms, family pressure, weak enforcement of the law, patriarchal system and poverty were the main reasons behind child marriages. The SPO along with civil society activists has also been working to ask the provincial government to implement the act properly.

There are no reliable statistics on the number of child marriages in Pakistan as few cases are reported to the police and the government does not track the issue. On April 7, two teenage girls who were allegedly forced to marry older men from within their community were recovered by police officials in the Kaloi town of the Tharparkar district.

In order to ensure an effective check on early marriages, it must be made binding upon Nikah registrars to see that the groom and the bride contracting wedlock do have a genuine computerised national identity cards (CNIC) as under the Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act-2013 the marriage of a person under 18 years of age is unlawful, said Javed Hussain of the Sindh Community Foundation.

The police should also play their role in restraining underage marriages by invoking relevant sections of the law while registering an FIR against offenders, he said. Pakistan ranks sixth in the world in terms of the highest absolute numbers of child marriage where 21 percent of girls are married by the age of 18, according to a report titled ‘Ending impunity for child marriages in Pakistan: Normative and implementation gaps’. This report was prepared by the global advocacy group, the Centre for Reproductive Rights, and released in Karachi in September last year.

The report also found that child marriage impacts girls more than boys because it makes them susceptible to domestic violence and reproductive health issues. The report recommended underage marriages should be declared null and void, penalties should be imposed on officials, including police and magistrates, who fail to take preventive or protective actions, and access provided to legal and other services to victims of child marriages.