Saudi government to assist 12-year-old girl in divorce case

A 12-year-old girl from Saudi Arabia who is seeking a divorce from the 80-year-old man she was forced to marry by her father will be represented in court by a lawyer appointed by the country's Human Rights Commission.

Last Wednesday a report by the Sydney Morning Herald/AFP quoted papers in Saudi Arabia as saying that the unnamed girl, whose mother opposed the marriage of her daughter to a cousin of her husband, had abandoned her efforts to obtain a divorce. It was stated that the unnamed girl acknowledged she had consented to the marriage, which had reportedly involved the payment of a dowry to the 12-year-old's family of 85,000 riyals ($22,667) and had supposedly been consummated, The latter fact has led the mother of the girl to claim that her daughter had actually been raped by the man related to the husband from whom it is said she is separated. But now it seems that the young girl's attempt to divorce her octogenarian husband in a court in the city of Buraidah has been resurrected with the assistance of the Saudi government. And the intervention in the case by the authorities in a country where the London Times confirms there is no minimum age for marriage and girls in poorer, tribal areas are frequently married off at a young age, is leading human rights activists to hope that a law setting the minimum age for marriage between 16 and 18 is moving closer. Such a law is already being discussed and the Telegraph notes that Saudi Arabia has signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in which it is stated that those aged 18 or under are deemed to be children. The only two countries to have signed but not ratified the Convention are Somalia and the U.S. However those countries that have ratified the Convention are not, in the eyes of the international community, necessarily abiding by it or implementing it in full. Iran is a country said by many to fall in to the former category, Canada is apparently a country in the latter category. With regard to the situation in Saudi Arabia, where a majority of the population are Sunni Muslims - the Wahhabi school of thought has some influence in the country - the marriage of young girls is justified by citing the case of Aisha, a bride of the Prophet Muhammad at the age of nine or 10. That argument was seemingly refuted by senior Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdullah al-Manie in January. He asserted that a marriage 1400 years ago had no bearing on the question of child marriages today. TheTelegraph quotes one human rights activist in Saudi Arabia, Wajiha al-Huweider, as saying that "We need to affect public opinion and I believe that Saudi Arabia will issue a law preventing child marriages soon", and another activist, Mufleh al-Qahtani, as explaining "Such a law will take a long time to be passed as there are social, religious, and cultural aspects". For the Saudi authorities Alanoud al-Hejailan, a lawyer for the Human Rights Commission, commented:

Our main concern is to safeguard the child's rights ... it is in the hands of the court but the commission is firmly on the child's side

A decision by the court in Buraidah is expected within the next few days and if the girl's petition for a divorce is rejected an appeal will be made. According to the London Times child brides challenging their marriages are rare in Saudi Arabia and it observes that last year a 9-year-old girl was told by a Saudi judge she could not divorce her husband, a man in his forties, until she reached puberty. Divorce rates where child brides are involved could be as high as 60 percent. Not that weddings in which the bride is a child are unique to Saudi Arabia. They take place elsewhere in the Middle East, in South Asia and, allegedly, in secret in the U.S. and the U.K., where they are illegal.