Pakistan\u00a0has outlawed child marriage and toughened penalties for those guilty of the crime in an effort to crack down on the practice which is estimated to affect one in five girls in the country.<\/p>\n
The legislation passed by the National Assembly, or lower house of parliament, also bans forced marriage involving women from minority groups.\u00a0Under the new law, offenders will face a minimum of five years in prison and may serve up to 10 years. They also face a fine of up to 1 million rupees (RM42,000).<\/p>\n
Before the change in law, offenders faced a minimum of three years in prison and a fine of 500,000 rupees (RM21,000).<\/p>\n
\u201cThe punishment has been made harsher in the law \u2026 in order to completely curb the social maladies which have risen because of the less stringent punishment and fines,\u201d Federal Law and Human Rights minister Zahid Hamid told Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone.
\nRead more at http:\/\/www.star2.com\/family\/children\/2017\/02\/11\/pakistan-gets-tough-on-child-marriages\/#dlgxoxWOmreIBAhw.99<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pakistan\u00a0has outlawed child marriage and toughened penalties for those guilty of the crime in an effort to crack down on the practice which is estimated to affect one in five girls in the country. The legislation passed by the National Assembly, or lower house of parliament, also bans forced marriage involving women from minority groups.\u00a0Under […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forced-marriage"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1195,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}