Lowering of marriage age requires amendment

THE proverb goes, “bad news travel fast” and we have witnessed it regarding draft law on child marriage. As we went to a remote village, namely Banisanta in Dacope, Khulna and our purpose was to monitor an extreme poverty programme run by the government of Bangladesh with the support of bi-lateral donors, we discovered with utter surprise that guardians are already aware that government is considering to lax legal ages of marriage.  The law has not been promulgated yet, but news have travelled so fast.

A national survey on child marriage in 2013 conducted by Plan Bangladesh and ICCDRB revealed a grim picture.  The study shows that in Bangladesh, 64% of women currently aged 20–24 were married before the age of 18. It has happened despite the fact that the current minimum legal age of marriage for females in Bangladesh is 18 years and 21 for males.

Debate renewed with the government drafting a new law, the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2014, to replace the earlier Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929.  The internationally recognised legal age for pre-adulthood is 18 and it has also been ratified as such in the Children Act. 

It has been stated at the very first article in Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), “For the purposes of the present Convention, a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier”. Bangladesh is one of the earliest signatories of this globally venerated convention. Bangladesh promulgated a number of laws following the suggestions of CRC committee and submitted periodic reports to the committee delineating improvements in realising rights of the children. 

Furthermore, any boy or girl below the age of 18 is not considered as adult according to the Majority Act 1875. It has been stated in Section 3 of the Majority Act that subject to some provisions mentioned in the Act, every other person domiciled in Bangladesh shall be deemed to have attained his majority when he shall have completed his age of eighteen years and not before.

The draft law has been criticised for simply following the old law in its concept, without addressing the wide prevalence of child marriage in Bangladesh. Increased penalties and stronger implementation of punishments are also viewed as problematic and inadequate. 

For many lawyers and rights groups, the draft law falls short as it remains ambiguous and does not outright declare child marriages as illegal. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has also called that the Bangladeshi government should set 18 as the minimum age for marriage to comply with international prohibitions against child marriage.

The writer is a human rights worker.