Deputy Chairman of the Parliamentary Commission: A 13-year-old girl is not a child wife

The deputy chairman of the Iranian parliament's legal and judicial commission says that child marriage should only apply to cases of marriage between a 9- or 10-year-old child and a 13-year-old girl "who is no longer a child wife."

Hassan Norouzi rejected the term child marriage for 13- and 14-year-old girls, saying: "The correct law for marriage is Islamic law, and the age of marriage for girls was considered to mean the age of puberty, which is generally 13 or 14 years old. Whether or not a girl can move forward in life also depends on the permission of her guardian."

According to Islamic law, the age of puberty for girls is 9 years old and for boys is 15 years old, but Iranian government officials generally agree with the marriage of girls over the age of 13.

According to the Statistical Center of Iran, the number of marriages of girls aged 10 to 14 increased by 10.5 percent in 2019 compared to the previous year, and about five percent of all registered marriages in 2019 were related to marriages of children under 15 years of age.

These estimates only relate to marriages registered with the country's Civil Registration Organization, and it seems that the actual number is higher.

In recent years, there have been efforts to reform laws related to child marriage, including a bill presented in parliament that would have set the "minimum age of marriage for girls at 16 years of age in the Islamic calendar and for boys at 18 years of age in the Islamic calendar," but due to opposition from some Shiite religious authorities, this bill was rejected.

In 2018, a bill banning child marriage was rejected by the Islamic Consultative Assembly's Judicial Committee. Hassan Norouzi was one of the opponents of the bill at the time, who considered raising the minimum age of marriage to be contrary to Islamic law and wrong, and said that girls who marry at a young age "get divorced less often and have healthier births."

According to official statistics from the Iranian Civil Registration Organization, in the first six months of this year, 791 children were born to mothers aged 10 to 14, and in the same period, 36,562 children were born to mothers aged 15 to 19.

Source: Radio Farda