JEDDAH – The National Human Rights Commission condemned marriages of minor girls that have surfaced as of late in Saudi Arabia, considering it an early death of innocent childhood, according to a statement issued by the commission Sunday.
The statement said that marrying off minor girls in the Kingdom continues to be a violation of the Rights of the Child Charter and the International Women’s Rights Treaty that Saudi Arabia signed in 1996 and 2000, respectively.
The Commission has been following media reports of marriages of minor girls in Saudi Arabia and now is working closely with the authorities concerned to stop this growing trend.
These marriages strip the girl of her basic right to choose her husband going against the grain of Islamic teachings that allows the woman to either accept or refuse the marriage, the statement said.
Medical studies have warned against adverse health and psychological impacts of early marriages on both the mother and her children, it added.
The Commission’s statement came after a court in Onaiza, in the northeastern Qassim Province, dismissed last month a divorce petition filed by the mother of an eight-year-old girl whose father married her off to a 58-year-old man. The court argued that the mother did not have the right to file such a case on behalf of her daughter and ordered that the petition should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty, usually around the age of 11.
Relatives of the family said the father had been going under financial pressures which forced him to receive an advance dowry of SR30,000 to marry off his 8-year-old daughter to the man who was 50 years older than her.
In January 2008, a Saudi delegation told a UN body – the committee on the elimination of discrimination against women – that human rights in the Kingdom were based on Shariah law.
The delegation said Saudi society was still largely a tribal one where new ideas took time to be accepted. – Okaz/SG