By Sareta Ashraph – The Atlantic Council –
The first quarter of 2025 saw widespread concern that the Iraqi government was, through its amendments to the 1959 Personal Status Law, legalizing child marriage and eroding human rights protections of women and girls.
Child marriage, and specifically the marriage of young girls to adult men, remains a long-standing problem in many parts of Iraq, even when forbidden under law. Tribal and religious leaders perform marriages outside the formal legal system, making it difficult for authorities to monitor or prevent child marriages. In areas stricken with poverty, conflict, and displacement, families are pushed to marry off their daughters as a means of economic survival or protection.
The original proposed text of the new amendments permitted the marriage of girls from the age of nine in certain circumstances, depending on religious interpretations, and granted religious authorities increased power over family matters, including marriage, divorce, and child custody. Proponents of those amendments, primarily conservative Shiite lawmakers, defended the changes as better aligning the law with Islamic principles and reducing Western influence on Iraqi culture.
Iraqi women’s rights activists protested that the amendments effectively “legalise child rape”, and constitute a dramatic rollback in the rights and protections previously guaranteed to women and children under Iraqi law. Their advocacy and pressure appear to have limited the amendments’ harm by retaining provisions for the minimum age of marriage, child custody, and polygamy.
Under the final text of amendments, which entered into force in February, Muslim couples concluding a marriage contract must elect whether the contract—which specifies right and obligations as regards marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance—is to be governed under the 1959 Personal Status Law or a Personal Status Code (mudawana), the latter to be developed by the Shia Ja’afari school of Islamic jurisprudence. For marriage contracts concluded and registered before the law’s effective date, either party may submit a request to the Personal Status Court to apply rulings of the Jaafari Shiite school of jurisprudence. If parties in a family dispute disagree on whether to apply the rulings of the Shiite Jaafari school in cases of divorce, the court will apply the choice of the husband.
The amendments also stipulate thatthe Shiite Endowment Scientific Council, with the assistance of judges and legal experts and in coordination with the State Council, shall develop a code of personal status based on the Jaafari Shiite school of jurisprudence, and submit it to the parliament within four months of the code’s effective date. This code must comply with existing provisions, including those of the 1959 Law, which sets the minimum age of marriage, with exceptions allowing marriage from the age of 15 with a judge’s permission and depending on the child’s “maturity and physical capacity.”
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