BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court directed the Child Development Project officers to ensure that awareness of criminal liability is displayed at every venue where marriages are usually held.
Temple authorities, marriage halls, and similar establishments should display notices stating that the marriage of a person below the age of 18 is prohibited by law and attracts criminal consequences.
“The pernicious practice of child marriage must be decisively uprooted. It must also be observed that responsibility does not rest solely on contracting parties. Where a marriage is solemnised in a temple, the management of a temple and the officiating priest who performs the ceremony may fall within the sweep of liability under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006.
If the marriage is conducted in a marriage hall or other venue, its management and facilitators cannot claim insulation. The statutory design, particularly under Section 11, contemplates accountability for those who promote, permit or fail to prevent such solemnization”, the court said.
Justice M Nagaprasanna passed the order recently, rejecting the petition filed by the parents of a 27-year-old man who married a 16-year-old minor girl, and her parents from Bengaluru Rural District, questioning the criminal proceedings initiated against them under the provisions of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act.
The court said, “The print and electronic media, as vital instruments of public consciousness, must also play their role in sensitising society. Eradication of child marriage is not merely a statutory goal; it is a Constitutional imperative. The law protects childhood so that it may blossom into informed adulthood. This court will not permit this protection to be diminished.”
The court noted that it is increasingly confronted with the growing stream of litigation arising either under the provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 or under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act.
A disturbing pattern emerges from these cases. Parents of both the boy and the girl, acting in concert and often under the mistaken cloak of social propriety, solemnise marriages of girls before they attain the age of 18 years. What is presented as familial consent is, in truth, a surrender of childhood, it added.
It also noted that a girl married before 18 does not merely enter matrimony, she exits. The promise of education fades into abstraction. The dream of academic or professional advancement remains a dream. The submission that the couple is presently living in harmony in this case does not efface the illegality committed at the time of solemnisation, the court said.