Pakistan Christians hail increase in marriage age

Christian leaders in Pakistan have welcomed the government raising the legal age of marriage for Christians, saying it could curb forced conversions and sexual abuse of their girls.

Pakistan’s Senate approved the Christian Marriage (Amendment) Bill 2023 on Feb. 26, amending the 1872 British-era law on Christian marriage.

The amendment raised the minimum age for Christians to marry from 16 to 18 for boys and from 13 to 18 for girls in the Muslim-majority nation.

The change “will curb early marriages of minor girls, especially in rural areas, and act as a safeguard for their health, education and overall wellbeing,” said Church of Pakistan President Bishop Azad Marshall in a press statement.

The new law “represents a crucial advancement in protecting our young girls from forced conversions and sexual abuse,” Bishop Marshall said in the Feb. 27 statement.

“We hope that the incoming government will pass necessary legislation to criminalize forced conversions of minority girls,” said the leader of the Protestant Church. Christian leaders say Muslim men frequently abduct young Hindu and Christian girls and sexually abuse and marry them after converting them to Islam. The legal age of marriage in Pakistan for Muslims is considered 18 years for men and 16 years for women based on a law against child marriage and Muslim family laws.

In 2013, the Sindh province increased the minimum age of marriage for girls to 18 years.

The Christian marriage law allowing the early marriage of girls was considered an excuse for abducting Christian girls, Christian leaders say. In the past year, at least 136 Hindu and Christian girls were abducted and forcibly converted for marriage, the Lahore-based Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a Christian human rights body. Abducted girls are often forced to tell courts that they converted and married out of free will and courts rule in favour of their marriage. The new law is “a welcome development,” said Peter Jacob, a CSJ director. The Council of Islamic Ideology, the country’s top religious advisory body, allows girls to get married once they hit puberty.

In the villages of Pakistan, girls are married off at puberty and Christians tend to follow local customs, leaders say. Although the Catholic Church's canonical age for marriage is 18, some priests make money by solemnizing child marriages, said Father Bonnie Mendes, a former secretary of the Pakistani Catholic Bishops' Council’s National Commission for Justice and Peace, a human rights body.

“The new law will counter this,” Mendes noted.

Marshall said that it “was a longstanding demand” of Christian leaders to increase the marriage age to 18 years for both Christian boys and girls. Another legislative change “unanimously agreed upon by all church denominations” relates to the dissolution of Christian marriage, Marshall said and expressed hope that it “would also be considered by parliament in due course.”

The Christian Divorce Act of 1869 stipulates that a Christian can seek divorce only on the grounds of adultery of the partner.

Although the Catholic Church does not support divorce, rights groups, and some Christian churches have been demanding the archaic divorce law be modernized.

Source: ucanews.com/news