What has recently appeared is that Shia Islamist parties in the Iraqi parliament are seeking to amend the law that regulates marriages and family relations in Iraq, according to which children as young as nine can get married.
The bill envisages the abolishment of Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law, which is actually one of the most liberal in Western Asia regarding women’s rights. The current law reminds people that the legal age of marriage is eighteen years for both males and females and also restricts second marriage for men.
However, the new draft bill would enable couples to determine the jurisdiction of their marriage according to either Sunni or Shia Islamic law. This change would reduce the marriage age to 15 for males and 9 for females, according to Islamic Ja’afari jurisprudence, which is based on the instructions of the sixth Shia Imam.
I have seen that proposed amendments have been described and criticized many times by working women groups and children’s rights activists. Iraq’s Tamara Amir, CEO of the Iraqi Women’s Rights Platform, said that the regulatory changes would turn “a dark and ugly face on the rights and lives of women and children in Iraq”.
Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, expressed discontent with the Coordination Framework. This Shia Islamist alliance is seeking the amendment, where she said, “they use this as a ‘distraction’ and cover for their inefficiencies, which include ‘massive corruption. ’”
Even though there are several countries able to perform child marriage, with 117 countries being permissible, the problem is severe in some regions of the world, specifically in Africa, where such Districts as Niger demonstrate that 76. 55% of girls are married before they are 18 years of age, and most of them are 15 years and below.
Economists reckon that the cost of eradicating the phenomena in 68 countries that still today constitute 90 percent of those girls would cost $35 billion or $600 per child bride by 2030. For example, the proposed amendment in Iraq indicates that the struggle for the protection of women’s and children’s rights is still raging on in countries which have, in the recent past, demonstrated reasonable progress.
