Yemen: Marriage of underage girls debate back on table

Underage girl marriage The debate over underage girl marriage is back on the table for Yemeni officials, as the National Comprehensive Dialogue will bring back the issue to the surface in November. This decision sparked controversy as various fronts believe that this issue should be dealt with by the parliament, saying that the National Comprehensive Dialogue is to address political, economic and security issues.
Technical committee's spokesperson Amal el-Basha defended the decision saying that this kind of marriage has always been a major violation of human rights in Yemen, which was never addressed effectively by the successive governments in the past.
"There is a reason to include the word "comprehensive" in the title of this dialogue. It means that the dialogue should be about all sorts of issues that affects Yemen's future" Basha said to Arabdstoday.
Basha, one of the most prominent women figures in the field of human rights in Yemen said that the time factor is not against including social topics in the dialogue, saying that six months is plenty to address all the topics enrolled by the technical committee.
The underage girl marriage controversy escalated in 2010 after the case of an eight-year-old girl who was forced to marry an aged man was revealed in the press. Other reports claimed that 6 young girls die in Yemen every day because of health problems related to underage marriage, particularly early pregnancy and relatively violent sexual relations.
Since then a fierce debate occurred over a draft law to set the minimum age to 18 years old for a woman to get married. Human rights and social activists were in favour of the law, but Islamist clerics and tribal leaders were against it. The law was eventually ignored by the parliament.
Between 400 and 500 people are expected to take part in the National Comprehensive Dialogue to represent to whole spectrum of society, revealed Amal el-Basha.
The National Comprehensive Dialogue conference is expected to set new foundations for the Yemeni state after an 15-month uprising succeeded in toppling former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who stepped down after a power transfer deal suggested by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and backed by the western powers. The GCC stated that drafting a new constitution for the country and restructuring its regime should be achieved through a national dialogue conference to be held within a 2-year timeline after Saleh's departure.