New Delhi, August 12: With courts swamped by cases of honour killings and teenagers seeking protection after marrying against their parents’ wishes, the Delhi High Court has asked the legislature to frame concrete and unambiguous laws regarding marriage of minors. Justice B D Ahmed said lawmakers must differentiate between marriages where parents force their children, particularly daughters, to get married at a very young age and cases of minors marrying without the consent of their parents.
“The former is clearly a scourge as it shuts out the development of children and is an affront to their individuality, personalities, dignity and, most of all, life and liberty. However, we have, in our experience in the present Bench, noticed a burgeoning of cases of missing daughters and married daughters detained by their parents. It is a serious societal problem having civil and criminal consequences,” observed the Bench, also comprising Justice V K Jain.
“The sooner the legislature examines these issues and comes out with a comprehensive and realistic solution, the better. Or else courts will be flooded with habeas corpus petitions and judges would be left to deal with broken hearts, weeping daughters, devastated parents and petrified young husbands running for their lives chased by serious criminal cases, when their ‘sin’ is that they fell in love,” said Justice Ahmed.
The court was hearing a petition by a 18-year-old boy who eloped with a 16-year-old girl and got married against their parents’ wishes. The couple had produced several letters and complaints written by the girl to the police, her family members and other authorities with a hope to be rescued from the clutches of her parents. Her parents had taken her along after the boy was arrested under charges of kidnapping and rape.
The Bench said marriage between two minors was not void, just voidable and that too if only either of the couple wanted it. The court held that the laws have explicitly made such a marriage voidable at the option of the child spouse but nobody other than a party to the marriage can petition for annulment of the marriage.
Noting that the welfare of the minor was of paramount importance in deciding the custody matters, the court further held that a husband could not be refused custody of his wife only on the ground that he was not an adult. “A minor husband is not incompetent, in law, to act as guardian of his minor wife,” said the court while giving the custody of the girl to her husband in the case.
–Agencies–