Morocco Approves Over 18,000 Child Marriage Requests in 2018, Report Shows

More and more in Morocco, child marriage is taking on growing proportions, despite all the measures taken by the public authorities to curb the phenomenon.

The media, Aujourd’hui le Maroc, which relies on the Annual Report on the Implementation of the Criminal Policy of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, states that 36% of requests for child marriage were rejected by the competent courts, i.e. a total of 12,140 requests.

The periods that see a large number of requests are well known and are between July and September, with 12,876 requests, then from October to December (7,131), from April to June (7,048) and from January to March (6,031). The same source specifies that 3,565 requests were accepted from January to March, 4,097 from April to June, 7,315 from July to September, and 3,445 from October to December.

On March 29, 2018, in order to circumscribe the phenomenon, the President of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Mohamed Abdennabaoui, sent a circular which presents child marriage as a violation of the rights of the child, in view of Article 32 of the Constitution, Articles 3 and 54 of the Family Code, as well as the commitments made by the Kingdom within the framework of international conventions. Mohamed Abdennabaoui instructed lawyers, royal prosecutors general and public prosecutors to prohibit any marriage request that does not take into account the interests of the minor, details the same source.

For its part, scandalized by this phenomenon which is taking on an alarming scale in the Kingdom, the National Human Rights Council (CNDH) and civil society are calling for the repeal of Article 20 of the Family Code on the legal provisions authorizing child marriage.