Marriage Registration amendment is ‘much needed’
from Christian Concern:
Baroness Cox’s proposal to require registration of religious marriages will help protect vulnerable women and is a step in the right direction, says Christian Concern’s Islamic Affairs Director, Tim Dieppe.
Baroness Cox has proposed an amendment to the Policing and Crime Bill that would require all religious marriages to be legally registered. This would prevent polygamy, and grant legal protection to women in the marriage. Many Muslim women have testified that they assumed that their Islamic marriage was legally recognised and were shocked to find that this is not the case. Without a legal marriage, women who are left by their husbands find they have little or no rights in terms of child custody, finance or property. By contrast, in Pakistan, and many other Islamic countries, registration of marriages is compulsory. The rights of married women are therefore better protected in Pakistan in this respect, than in the UK as the law currently stands.
I myself recently heard a women testify that she was married in an Islamic marriage and has a video of the ceremony. Subsequently her husband declared that he was never married to her and shamed her to all her relatives and friends. When she complained to the Mosque they did not acknowledge that they had carried out the ceremony, even when confronted with the video evidence. This is an extreme case, but one that would be entirely prevented by Baroness Cox’s amendment.
There is increasing acknowledgement that sharia courts or councils operating in the UK are creating a quasi-parallel legal system and systematically discriminating against women. Last week, the Women and Equalities Minister Justine Greening said that the government is taking concerns raised by Baroness Cox about these councils “extremely seriously.”
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