Iraqi parliament rejects changing child marriage law

An Iraqi parliamentary committee has blocked proposed amendments that would have made it legal for girls as young as nine to get married.

The changes to Iraq’s personal status law, which bans forced marriage and restricts polygamy, would have codified marriage, divorce, inheritance and child custody procedures under religious law.

The amendments were proposed by members of several Shiite parties, spearheaded by the Fadhila party, sparking outrage from women’s rights groups.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) revealed yesterday that parliament’s women’s rights committee rejected the proposals in November .

But the group only reported the decision now, “because we were waiting to see if that would be reversed”, Belkis Wille, a senior Iraq researcher at HRW, said.

The organisation expects the MPs to continue their push for the amendments in the lead-up to national elections in May.

A spokesman for the parliament speaker, Salim Al Jubouri, said parliament had no intention of making any amendments to the personal status law.

“The parliament has hundreds of proposed ideas for new laws every week and this was one of them. It didn’t get the approval to be debated in parliament,” Abdel Al Malik Husseini said.

Ms Wille said the rejection of the proposals was momentous.

“It is very good to see that the women’s rights movement is backed by a group of MPs that continue to fight this, despite the pressure,” she said.

“This moment is very similar to the situation the women’s rights movement faced in 2014, when again conservative members of parliament were pushing to amend the personal status law.”

The law, introduced in 1959, is considered to be one of the most protective of women’s rights in the region. It is applied to all Iraqis regardless of their religious beliefs and sets the legal age of marriage at 18. In urgent cases, however, a judge is allowed to permit girls as young as 15 to marry.

Mr Al Jubouri had spoken out against the proposed changes in November, saying: “One of the things the media has got wrong is that it’s not a bill. Right now, it’s only a suggestion, an idea.

“There are so many more stages it would need to go through to become a bill and then a law. It won’t find a way to be passed.”