Bangladesh: Legalizing Child Marriage Threatens Girls’ Safety

The Bangladesh Government should move quickly to adopt regulations to limit the harms of a new law that legalizes child marriage, Human Rights Watch said today. On February 27, 2017, the Bangladesh parliament approved a law that permits girls under age 18 to marry under “special circumstances,” with permission from their parents and a court. There is no minimum age for these marriages.

This law is a devastating step backward for the fight against child marriage in Bangladesh, which has the highest rate of child marriage in Asia, and one of the highest rates in the world, with 52 percent of girls married before age 18, and 18 percent married before age 15. Under the previous law, the legal age of marriage was 18 for women and 21 for men, with no exceptions. Read more here:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/03/02/bangladesh-legalizing-child-marriage-threatens-girls-safety