BERLIN: Germany’s cabinet Wednesday moved to ban child marriages after the recent mass refugee influx brought in many couples where one or both partners were aged under 18.
The new law, set to receive parliamentary approval by July, is seen as a protective move especially for girls by annulling foreign marriages involving minors.
It will allow youth welfare workers to take into care underaged girls even if they were legally married abroad and, if deemed necessary, separate them from their husbands.
“Children do not belong in the marriage registry office or the wedding hall,” said Justice Minister Heiko Maas.
“We must not tolerate any marriages that harm minors in their development.”
“The underaged must be protected as much as possible,” he added, stressing that no minor must suffer restrictions on their asylum or residential status as a result of the change.
The age of consent for all marriages in Germany will be raised from 16 to 18 years. Currently in some cases an 18-year-old is allowed to marry a 16-year-old.
Foreign marriages involving spouses under 16 will be considered invalid, and those involving 16 or 17-year-olds can be annulled by family courts.
Rare exceptions are possible, for example when one of the spouses suffers from a serious illness — but only if the couple are now both adults and both want to stay married.
The draft law would also punish with a fine any attempts to marry minors in traditional or religious rather than state ceremonies.
There were 1,475 married minors registered in Germany last July — 361 of them aged under 14 — according to the latest figures released after a parliamentary request.
Of these 1,152 were girls, said the interior ministry.
The largest group, 664 children, came from Syria followed by 157 from Afghanistan, 100 from Iraq, and 65 from Bulgaria.
The conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung welcomed the bill, saying that “archaic practices that harm women and children have no place” in Germany.
The aim was not to “paternalistically spread one’s values or disrespect foreign cultures,” but to enforce “fundamental and, in principle, globally recognized human rights.”
The non-profit German Children’s Aid Foundation said it generally welcomed the new draft law as a sign of “progress” but said courts should have latitude in some tricky cases where one spouse is aged 16 or 17.
These could involve underage couples that have their own children, who could then be considered born out of wedlock and lose certain entitlements and inheritance rights, warned the group’s head, Thomas Krueger.
In such cases, recognizing a marriage involving one 16 or 17-year-old “can be acceptable, for example, if the relationship is proven to be emotionally stable and there is no evidence of compulsion,” he said in a statement.
“The opinion of the minor is also decisive and must absolutely be taken into account.”
Germany cracks down on child marriages
Germany cracks down on child marriages
French publisher recalls dictionary over ‘Jewish settler’ reference
- The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks”
- The four books are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said
PARSI: French publisher Hachette on Friday said it had recalled a dictionary that described the Israeli victims of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “Jewish settlers” and promised to review all its textbooks and educational materials.
The Larousse dictionary for 11- to 15-year-old students contained the same phrase as that discovered by an anti-racism body in three revision books, the company told AFP.
The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a major humanitarian crisis in the region.”
The worst attack in Israeli history saw militants from the Palestinian Islamist group kill around 1,200 people in settlements close to the Gaza Strip and at a music festival.
“Jewish settlers” is a term used to describe Israelis living on illegally occupied Palestinian land.
The four books, which were immediately withdrawn from sale, are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said, promising a “thorough review of its textbooks, educational materials and dictionaries.”
France’s leading publishing group, which came under the control of the ultra-conservative Vincent Bollore at the end of 2023, has begun an internal inquiry “to determine how such an error was made.”
It promised to put in place “a new, strengthened verification process for all its future publications” in these series.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that it was “intolerable” that the revision books for the French school leavers’ exam, the baccalaureat, “falsify the facts” about the “terrorist and antisemitic attacks by Hamas.”
“Revisionism has no place in the Republic,” he wrote on X.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, with 251 people taken hostage, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces during their bombardment of the territory since, while nearly 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, according to UN data.
Israeli forces have killed at least 447 Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
