(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) A Muslim coalition in Iraq has pushed proposals to lower the legal age of marriage for girls to just nine years old, which resulted in a massive backlash from activists and rights groups who dared to oppose pedophiles.
The Daily Mail reported that protesters demonstrated in Baghdad, the country’s capital, this week to express their outrage at pro-pedophile changes that would allow religious sects to legislate on aspects of personal status rather than the courts.
The news source added that since many Iraqi marriages are conducted informally and left unregistered, the revisions would allow figures from Sunni and Shia religious sects to finalize unions between people in law.
Critics said that the Shia code would be based on ‘Jaafari jurisprudence,’ which would allow girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 to get married. The current Iraqi law states that a man and a woman must be at least 18 years old to get married.
“The Iraqi community categorically rejects these proposals. It is a degrading step for both Iraqi men and women alike. This is what we have been fighting against for years,” women’s rights activist Suhalia Al Assam said.
A coalition of conservative Shia Islamist parties, which form the largest bloc in parliament, has pushed the amendments to Law No. 188, the Personal Status Law of 1959.
The Coordination Framework attempted to hold a first reading on July 24, 2024, but postponed the plans until Aug. 4, 2024, after meeting resistance from people.
Protesters gathered in Tahrir Square in the capital on Aug. 8, 2024, to oppose the bill.
Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), said that the Coordination Framework was using the changes to distract from their own “corruption” and political failures, adding that the proposals served to “terrorize Iraqi women and civil society with a legislation that strips away all the rights that Iraqi women gained in modern times.”
She also said that the bill would “force archaic Islamic sharia on them that regards women as bodies for pleasure and breeding, and not as [human beings] with human rights.”
