The militant Islamist group has linked the age of consent to the onset of puberty, permitting women as younger as 9 to be bought off by their households.
Ladies as younger as 9 can legally marry beneath the brand new regulation (Picture: Getty)
The Taliban have legalised baby marriage and handed a regulation enabling the silence of a “virgin lady” who has reached puberty to be interpreted as marital consent. The militant Islamist group eliminated the minimal marriage age for women in Afghanistan by linking eligibility to puberty, in response to an official doc titled Ideas of Separation Between Spouses.
The authorized marriage age within the Central Asian nation was beforehand 18 for boys and 16 for women, with the brand new regulation successfully reducing the latter to simply nine-years-old. Marriage of ladies youthful than 15 was additionally criminalised within the 2009 Elimination of Violence Towards Ladies regulation.
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Horia Mosadiq, director of the Battle Evaluation Community, instructed The Occasions: “Underneath the brand new regulation, that age restrict is eliminated. If a lady reaches puberty on the age of 9 or ten, she is taken into account of a authorized age to marry.”
The Taliban seized management of Kabul in 2021 (Picture: Getty)
Kabul fell to the Taliban 5 years in the past after Western troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.
The militant group has imposed an excessive interpretation of Sharia Legislation within the intervening interval, together with extreme repression of ladies’s rights and financial isolation.
Mr Mosadiq mentioned the brand new regulation successfully legalises baby rape, describing it as “one other degree of atrocity that the Taliban are inflicting on girls since they got here to energy”.
Shaharzad Akbar, govt director of Afghan rights organisation Rawadari, added: “The regulation … basically acknowledges that marriages of minors occur.
“In the event that they occur, the lady can get out of it, however solely by going to a Taliban court docket, and solely beneath sure situations.”
Such situations embrace when guardians are confirmed to be abusive, morally corrupt or mentally unfit. Marriages can’t be invalidated on the idea of non-compatibility, nonetheless.
Final yr, a 45-year-old Afghan man married a six-year-old lady after paying the lady’s household cash in trade for her in a standard apply often known as walmar, offering determined residents with much-needed money. The Taliban ordered him to attend till she turns 9 earlier than taking her house.
A United Nations report in 2024 discovered that restrictions on girls’s rights, requiring them to cowl their total our bodies and whisper when in public, had fuelled a rise within the apply of kid and compelled marriage by as much as 25%.
The remedy of ladies within the Taliban-run nation has been labelled as a criminal offense in opposition to humanity by the Worldwide Legal Court docket, with arrest warrants issued for 2 senior regime figures.
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