Mozambique: Make law against child marriage operational, civil society demands

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Mozambique: Make law against child marriage operational, civil society demands

6:01 CAT | 20 May 2021

Photo: O Pais

Mozambican girls under 18 years of age are still being forced into child marriages, particularly in the northern province of Nampula and Cabo Delgado, and the southern province of Inhambane.

Civil society bodies fighting for the rights of women and girls, meeting in Maputo on Wednesday, said that fighting against this phenomenon depends on putting into operation the law criminalising child marriage that was passed two years ago.

“When we analyse the situation of child marriages, it is important not to look only at remote areas, even though this is where the problem is at its most serious”, said the civil society activists. “If we look at Maputo city, we have cases of child marriage, but they are not denounced, and to some extent they are being normalised”.

Cited in Thursday’s issue of the independent daily “O Pais”, the chairperson of the Coalition for the Elimination of Child Marriages (CECAP), Ferosa Zacarias, admitted that up-to-date statistics on child marriage are not available, because insufficient field research has been done.

Carrying out such research, she added, had been made difficult by the Covid-19 pandemic. “We cannot say whether the number of cases (of child marriage) has increased or declined, but we do now have the advantage of a law that criminalises this practice”, she said.

However, the law had not been well publicised, and so CECAP complained that “people still don’t know that facilitating a child marriage is a crime, punishable by law”.

Mozambique has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world. Data published by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) indicate that 48 per cent of Mozambican women aged between 20 and 24 had already married, or been in a marital union, before the age of 18 and 14 per cent before the age of 15.

The Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, voted unanimously to criminalise child marriage in July 2019. Under the law, any adult who marries or enters into a sexual union with a child under 18 years of age will be punished with a prison term of between eight and 12 years. No marriage will be allowed until both partners have celebrated their 18th birthday.

Any public servant who celebrates or authorises a marriage where one of the partners is under 18 may be jailed for between two and eight years. Any agent of a traditional or religious authority who consciously authorises such a marriage faces a two year sentence.

As for those who hand over children for marriage, in exchange for payment or some material benefit, or to pay off a debt, or to comply with a promise, they can be sentenced to between two and eight years. This clause covers parents, guardians, step-parents and any other direct relative of the child concerned.

This eliminated a clause in the Mozambican Family Law, which allowed children to marry at the age of 16 with parental consent (even though the same law stipulates the normal minimum age for marriage as 18). This clause in the law was widely abused, and there were frequent cases of parents marrying off their daughters at a much younger age than 16.

Source: AIM