Egypt's Parliament calls for combating child marriage

CAIRO - 12 March 2026: Egypt's Parliament has taken several steps to combat child marriage, focusing on closing legal loopholes and introducing criminal penalties for those who facilitate it.The Human Rights Committee of the Egyptian House of Representatives witnessed a heated session, Thursday over the persistent crisis of child marriage in Egypt.

Prompted by a briefing request from MP Mohamed Farid, the discussion exposed a stark gap between official government awareness campaigns and the grim reality on the ground, where over 70,000 cases of underage marriages were officially documented in 2024.

MP Mohamed Farid presented alarming data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), revealing 70,489 cases of "ratified" marriages (legalizing a marriage that had already taken place) involving brides under the age of 18. Farid warned that these figures are just the tip of the iceberg, as many "Urfi" (informal) marriages involve girls as young as 12 and 13, remaining unregistered and leaving them without legal protection.

"The Constitution defines a child as anyone under 18," Farid stated, emphasizing that early marriage is a grave violation of human rights and a direct threat to the physical and mental health of young girls.

Representatives from the Ministry of Religious Endowments (Awqaf) and the Ministry of Social Solidarity defended their efforts, citing thousands of awareness seminars and the training of female preachers and social workers.

In a notable technological update, the Ministry of Awqaf revealed it is currently developing a first-of-its-kind Arabic AI model (similar to ChatGPT). This model is designed to reflect Egyptian and Arab identity while dismantling extremist ideologies often used to justify child marriage.

However, the Committee Chairman, MP Tarek Radwan, criticized the government’s approach as "reactive rather than proactive," noting that traditional religious discourse is no longer sufficient in the age of digital platforms.

To combat the phenomenon, the Human Rights Committee issued a set of decisive recommendations across three main axes:

Prevention: Intensifying media campaigns on social media (including TikTok) to target mothers and families, focusing on the educational and economic risks of early marriage.

Protection: Activating child protection sub-committees in all governorates and linking them to rapid intervention mechanisms. This includes providing psychological and educational support for survivors.

Strict Enforcement: Implementing the Child Law with full rigor, increasing penalties for authorized marriage officials (Maazouns) and complicit families, and creating a national database to track and expedite judicial cases related to child marriage.

The session concluded with a call for total coordination between the Ministries of Interior, Health, Justice, and Social Solidarity to ensure that no child falls through the legal cracks.

Egypt’s National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) had announced that it will launch a pilot programme to provide girls with vocational and technical training to offer families economic alternatives to child marriage, the council’s head said.

Sahar El-Sombaty, President of the NCCM, stated during a roundtable titled “Economic Empowerment as a Pivotal Tool to Reduce Child Marriage” that although child marriage is prohibited in Egypt, the council is coordinating with the Ministry of Justice and religious institutions to draft a formal legal framework to criminalise the practice. While Egyptian law currently bars the registration of marriages for those under 18, the proposed legislation aims to establish penal consequences for perpetrators in response to health and psychological risks that El-Sombaty noted can lead to maternal mortality.

The initiative, conducted in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), seeks to address the social and economic dimensions of child marriage. El-Sombaty described the practice as a grave violation of children’s rights that leads to lower education rates, increased risks of gender-based violence, and poor reproductive health indicators.

In January 2020, another draft bill was proposed  by MP Kamal Amer, Chairman of the Defense and National Security Committee in the House of Representatives.

The bill calls on criminalizing the children marriage [those under the age of 18 years], as one of the crimes of violence against women, as well as stiffening the penalty to become imprisonment and a fine of not less than LE5000 and not exceeding LE1000, for everyone who participated in the crime, called, promoted for early marriage.

On October 15, 2017, Egypt’s National Council for Women launched the “No to Underage Marriage” campaign in cooperation with the Ministry of Religious Endowments and Christian clerics. The campaign’s main objective is to curtail undocumented marriages of minors.