‘No more parallel Islamic law’: Germany looks to up marriage age after flood of underage weddings
Senior politicians from Germany’s ruling center-right coalition held a meeting to hammer out a new law that will stem the glut of marriages between older male migrants and under-18 women, who are often child brides imported from Third World countries.
"The priority of child welfare and the equal treatment of men and women are pillars of our society and our understanding of our values," said a strategy paper published by the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Bavarian coalition partners Christian Social Union (CSU) in the regional newspaper Passauer Neue Presse.
According to existing German law, a couple is allowed to wed if one of the partners has turned 16, but is not yet 18, as long as the future spouses obtain a court permission. Over the past year, more than 1,000 such weddings have been conducted across the country, the vast majority of them involving older Muslim men, many of them recent migrants, among the nearly one million, who have come to the country since the start of 2015.
A certain percentage of underage weddings is downright illegal, and involve pedophilia. Although exact figures are unavailable, some of the brides involved may not even have been 16, having been married outside Germany, where such practices are legally acceptable. Others arrive with forged documents that state that they are older than their true age, mostly as part of an arranged, or even a forced marriage.
"The annulment of foreign child marriages must be the policy going forward," said the paper. "When the youth office becomes aware of a child marriage in the future, it must file a petition for annulment."
What then if the child has given birth? What happens to the babies? It smells like worms in that can they are trying to open.
The Deputy Chairman of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, Stephan Harbarth, has called for a new universal age limit of 18 to be imposed by the end of the year, and has called on Justice Minister Heiko Maas, from the center-left SPD, to take action.
“Our proposal is on the table. We are ready to legislate,” he told Passauer Neue Presse.
“According to our cultural ideas, child marriage is unacceptable… Also, arranged marriage – everyone must be allowed to choose their partner. We will not tolerate illegal parallel Islamic justice.”
Faced with a huge number of as-yet unintegrated migrants, Germany is facing complex legal decisions on a host of culturally-sensitive issues, from the legal status of the burqa, to the impact of polygamy on inheritance law.
Meanwhile,
Gurka ban: German mayor in a pickle after posting
picture of cucumber 'wearing Islamic dress’
The conservative mayor of a district in Bonn was forced to apologize after posting a “humorous” pic of a cucumber that looked like a woman wearing a burka – on the same day as the closure of a controversial Saudi-sponsored school in her town.
The private King Fahd School in the German city opened over two decades ago, and has taught children a version of the Saudi Wahhabi curriculum in Arabic. The white marble building topped by a minaret has attracted criticism for prioritizing religion over education, and has been labeled an “indoctrination center.”
Yet this week it surprisingly announced its apparently voluntary closure, and the halt of the construction of a second school.
To coincide with the news, Simone Stein-Luecke, mayor of Bad Godesberg, the district where the school is located, posted a picture of a cucumber with a small slice near the top, which resembled a burka with an eye slit. The caption read ‘Gurka’ – a pun on the German word for cucumber.
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