Pakistan’s legal system continues to treat child marriage as a procedural irregularity rather than a substantive violation of rights, writes Shaheena Beegum
The March 30, 2026 ruling of Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court in the Maria Shahbaz case has once again thrust the country’s contradictory legal treatment of child marriage into the spotlight.
In this case, the court validated the marriage of a minor Christian girl to a Muslim man, grounding its reasoning in Islamic jurisprudence that permits marriage between a Muslim man and a woman from the “People of the Book.”
Crucially, while acknowledging that penalties under child marriage laws may apply, the court declined to declare the marriage void. This decision has intensified long‑standing concerns about the fragmented and inconsistent legal framework governing child marriage in Pakistan.
The ruling is particularly concerning when placed against the backdrop of recent legislative reforms. On May 30, 2025, the Islamabad Capital Territory Child Marriage Restraint Act came into force, setting eighteen as the minimum legal age for marriage and criminalising underage unions.
This reform followed a 2023 Federal Shariat Court judgment that upheld eighteen as a valid minimum age, emphasising that mental maturity (rushd) not merely puberty is a prerequisite for marriage under Islamic principles. These developments suggested a slow but meaningful shift toward harmonising Pakistan’s laws with international human‑rights standards.
The latest Federal Constitutional Court ruling demonstrates how easily these gains can be undermined. By validating a marriage involving a minor while simultaneously recognising that the act of contracting such a marriage is punishable, the court has entrenched a troubling duality: child marriage may be a crime, but its outcome remains legally enforceable.
This contradiction weakens statutory protections and leaves minors, particularly girls vulnerable to coercion, forced conversion, and exploitation.
The inconsistency becomes even more apparent when compared to the Islamabad High Court’s handling of the Madiha Bibi case on October 1, 2025. In that case, the court allowed a fifteen‑year‑old girl to live with her husband, despite official records confirming she was underage.
The court reasoned that while the 2025 Act criminalises marriage under eighteen, it does not render such marriages void. The judgment leaned heavily on Islamic jurisprudence, which presumes puberty at fifteen and considers marriage valid if free consent is given. This reasoning echoed earlier precedents, including the 1970 Mauj Ali case, which held that a marriage contracted after puberty is valid even if it violates statutory age requirements.
Taken together, these rulings reveal a deeper structural problem: Pakistan’s legal system continues to treat child marriage as a procedural irregularity rather than a substantive violation of rights. The courts’ reluctance to invalidate such marriages reflects a broader judicial tendency to prioritise religious interpretations over statutory protections, even when those interpretations conflict with constitutional guarantees of dignity, equality, and bodily autonomy.
This legal ambivalence is compounded by Pakistan’s uneven provincial landscape. Sindh criminalised marriage under eighteen in 2013, but Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan still operate under the colonial‑era Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, which sets the minimum age for girls at sixteen.
The 2025 Islamabad reforms created a progressive federal enclave, but without nationwide harmonisation, the law remains patchy and easily circumvented. The Federal Shariat Court’s 2023 affirmation of eighteen as a valid minimum age offered an opportunity for uniform reform, yet political resistance particularly from religious parties has stalled progress.
The consequences of this fragmentation are borne disproportionately by girls. Child marriage truncates education, increases exposure to domestic violence, and heightens the risk of early pregnancy and maternal mortality.
Pakistan’s maternal mortality ratio remains among the highest in South Asia, and early marriage is a major contributing factor. The courts’ insistence on validating marriages involving minors even when acknowledging their criminality effectively binds girls to relationships that jeopardise their health, autonomy, and future.
The political economy of child marriage further entrenches the practice. In many rural areas, early marriage is embedded in kinship structures, tribal customs, and economic survival strategies. Families facing poverty often view marriage as a means of reducing financial burdens or securing social protection for daughters.
Local power brokers including feudal landlords, tribal leaders, and clerics benefit from maintaining these norms, which reinforce patriarchal authority and limit women’s mobility and economic participation. Judicial decisions that validate underage marriages, even inadvertently, strengthen these entrenched interests.
Religious discourse also plays a central role. While many Islamic scholars support raising the marriage age to eighteen, others insist that puberty should remain the determining criterion.
Courts have often deferred to this latter view, citing the Enforcement of Shariah Act of 1991, which requires laws to be interpreted consistently with Islamic principles where multiple interpretations are possible. This deference has created a legal environment in which statutory protections are routinely overridden by contested religious interpretations.
The result is a system in which child marriage persists not because the law is silent, but because the law speaks in contradictory voices.
The 2026 Federal Constitutional Court ruling exemplifies this tension: it acknowledges the harms of child marriage yet upholds the validity of a union involving a minor. It recognises the need for protection yet reinforces a framework that leaves children unprotected.
