Rights Group Tells UN Council Pakistan's Child Marriage Laws Are Only as Good as Their Enforcement

Human Rights Focus Pakistan (HRFP) told the UN Human Rights Council's 63rd session in Geneva on September 28, 2026, that Pakistan's problem with child marriage is no longer primarily a legislative gap — it is an enforcement one, with more than half of recorded child marriages happening in provinces where the practice was already illegal.

The numbers HRFP presented

HRFP President Naveed Walter cited data showing that close to 19 million women and girls in Pakistan were married before the age of 18, including 4.6 million married before turning 15. UNICEF figures presented alongside the intervention put the total number of women, children and girls affected by child-rights violations in Pakistan at 90 million, of whom 4.8 million are under 15. Nearly four in five of those married before 18 had already given birth before reaching adulthood themselves. The figure Walter leaned on hardest, though, was the enforcement gap: 54% of children married in Pakistan were married in provinces where the marriage already violated the minimum-age law in force at the time.

The legal backdrop

Sindh became the first province to set 18 as the minimum marriage age for both sexes, in 2013. Punjab, Islamabad and Balochistan followed only much later, in 2025 and 2026, with Punjab passing its own Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2026 this year. On paper, Pakistan now has a more consistent legal floor on marriage age across its provinces than it has had in decades. Walter's point to the Council was that the floor has existed in some form since 2013 without closing the enforcement gap, and that religious parties are already challenging the newer provincial laws in court — meaning even the current legal baseline is not fully secure. The Supreme Court has been active on related family-law questions this year, ruling in September that dower cannot be used as a coercive tool against wives, which suggests the judiciary is at least engaging with the broader legal architecture around marriage even as child-marriage enforcement lags behind it.

What HRFP is asking for

Rather than proposing new legislation, Walter asked the Council to push for stronger monitoring of enforcement through existing international mechanisms, including trade-linked reviews such as the EU's GSP+ scheme, under which Pakistan already has €65 million in financing and continued tariff-free access for 89% of its EU-bound textile exports at stake. HRFP wants that kind of external leverage attached to measurable child-marriage indicators specifically: the number of marriages actually prevented from registration, prosecutions initiated against those who arrange underage marriages, and convictions secured — rather than the existence of a law being treated as sufficient on its own.

A side event on minority girls

A side event held during the same 63rd session focused specifically on forced and child marriages involving girls from Pakistan's religious minority communities, a category that rights groups have long argued is undercounted in national statistics because minority marriages are less consistently registered. The scrutiny lands in the same week a separate rights report told the government that a culture of scrutinising victims rather than perpetrators is letting gender-based violence go unaddressed nationally, citing 3,172 gender-based violence cases logged in the first half of 2026 alone.

The test ahead

Walter's framing was blunt: the real test of Pakistan's child-marriage laws will be whether courts and public institutions protect every child, not whether a minimum age is written into statute. With Punjab's law facing an active court challenge and HRFP's own data showing most child marriages already happen in places the practice is nominally illegal, that test is still unresolved — and the Council session put a specific set of enforcement numbers on record that Pakistan's next periodic review will be measured against.

Build Better Pakistan's Rights Desk is tracking Pakistan's child-marriage enforcement record and will follow up when the Punjab law's court challenge is decided.