By Hadeel Al-Shalchi, The Associated Press
CAIRO - An eight-year-old Saudi girl has divorced the middle-aged
husband her father forced her to marry last year in exchange for about
$13,000, her lawyer said Thursday.
Saudi Arabia has come under increasing criticism at home and
abroad for permitting child marriages. The United States, a close ally
of the conservative Muslim kingdom, has called child marriage a "clear
and unacceptable" violation of human rights.
The girl was allowed to divorce the 50-year-old man whom she
married in August after an out-of-court settlement was reached in the
case, said her lawyer, Abdulla al-Jeteli. The exact date of the divorce
was not immediately known.
A court in the central Oneiza region previously rejected a request
by the girl's mother for a divorce and ruled that the girl would have
to wait until she reached puberty to file a petition.
There are no laws in Saudi Arabia defining the minimum age for
marriage. Though a woman's consent is legally required, some marriage
officials don't seek it.
There has been a push by Saudi human rights groups to define the
age of marriage and put an end to the phenomenon. One Saudi human
rights activist, Sohaila Zain al-Abdeen, was optimistic that the girl's
divorce would help efforts to get a law passed enforcing a minimum
marriage age of 18.
"Unfortunately, some fathers trade their daughters," she told The
Associated Press. "They are weak people who are sometimes in need of
money and forget their roles as parents."
It was not clear if the husband received money for the divorce
settlement. The man had given the girl's father 50,000 riyals, or about
US$13,350, as a marriage gift in return for his daughter, the lawyer
said.
The eight-year-old's marriage was not the only one in the kingdom
to receive attention in recent months. Saudi newspapers have
highlighted several cases in which young girls were married off to much
older men or young boys, including a 15-year-old girl whose father, a
death-row inmate, married her off to a cellmate.
Saudi Arabia's conservative Muslim clergy have opposed the drive
to end child marriages. In January, the kingdom's most senior cleric
said it was permissible for 10-year-old girls to marry and those who
believe they are too young are doing the girls an injustice.
But some in the government appear to support the movement to set a
minimum age for marriage. The kingdom's new justice minister was quoted
in mid-April as saying the government was doing a study on underage
marriage that would include regulations.
There are no statistics to show how many marriages involving
children are performed in Saudi Arabia every year. Activists say the
girls are given away in return for hefty marriage gifts or as a result
of long-standing custom in which a father promises his infant daughters
and sons to cousins out of a belief that marriage will protect them
from illicit relationships.
