Iraq’s new bill proposes to lower the age of marriage for females to nine, women protest in Baghdad

Women’s rights activists have been voicing their protests over a bill which resurfaced in the Iraqi parliament that could spike underage marriage in the nation. The bill, if passed, would allow citizens to choose either religious leaders or civil judiciaries to ‘decide on family affairs’ – and could effectively lower the age for girls to marry to as low as nine, reports Metro newspaper.

The Coordination Framework, which is a coalition of conservative Shia Islamist parties in the country, has been promoting the amendments to Law 188, the Personal Status Law of 1959. Lawmakers have been following the 1959 law but the newly proposed amendment will allow citizens to choose either the age of 18 for marriage or follow religious rules.

In Iraq, several marriages are suspected to be unregistered and conducted by religious figures. These marriages stand out to be illegal as per the current Iraqi Personal Status Law.

The proposed amendments could see those marriages – 22 percent of which, according to the UN, involve girls under 14 – legitimised by the state, reports Middle East Eye.

Ra’ad al-Maliki, the MP who proposed the bill, has also hit back at claims that the bill would lower the minimum age for marriage, calling them “lies fabricated by some out of hatred for applying the provisions of God’s law to those who want them”, the news portal reported.

Women have started protesting against the proposed bill.

Campaigners belonging to the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) recently demonstrated in Baghdad against the bill. Yanar Mohammed, president of OWFI, told Middle East Eye that the Coordination Framework were trying to push the “archaic” laws as a means of distracting from their own failings, including “huge corruption”.

“Their most efficient tool for this distraction is to terrorise Iraqi women and civil society with a legislation that strips away all the rights that Iraqi women gained in modern times, and force archaic Islamic sharia on them that regards women as bodies for pleasure and breeding, and not as human being[s] with human rights,” she said.

Over the last 20 years, child marriage rates have steadily been increasing in Iraq, as per Human Rights Watch. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 28 percent of girls in Iraq are married before they turn 18.

According to the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq, 22 percent of unregistered marriages involved girls under the age of 14.

Child marriage puts girls at increased risk of sexual and physical violence, adverse physical and mental health consequences, and being denied access to education and employment, read the Human Rights Watch website.