The Exception That Swallows the Rule: Section 19 of Bangladesh’s Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017

I. Introduction

Nearly half of Bangladeshi girls marry before the age of eighteen, giving the country the highest rate of child marriage in South Asia.[1] Parliament confronted this crisis in 2017 by repealing the colonial-era Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 and enacting a stricter replacement, one that raised penalties for offenders and created prevention committees at every level of government.[2] Yet buried within that same reforming statute sits section 19, a ‘special provision’ permitting a court to authorise marriage below the statutory minimum age wherever it is satisfied that the marriage serves ‘the best interests of the minor’, with parental or guardian consent.[3] In other words, the same Act that criminalises child marriage simultaneously provides a lawful route to perform it.

Section 19 was framed during legislative debate as a narrow safety valve for exceptional cases. In practice, it has been applied principally to cases of unmarried adolescent pregnancy, pursuant to rules drafted without meaningful legislative scrutiny.[4]

This article argues that section 19 is not a narrow, carefully bounded exception but a structural fault line running through the entire Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017—one that licences precisely the conduct the statute exists to prevent and that sits uneasily with Bangladesh’s obligations under both its own Constitution and international human rights law. The article proceeds as follows. Section II sets out the legal framework governing child marriage in Bangladesh, including the constitutional dimension and the place of section 19 within it. Section III analyses the limited domestic case law on the provision alongside a relevant foreign authority. Section IV offers a critical evaluation of section 19’s design defects. Section V draws comparative lessons from the experiences of India and Malawi. The article concludes that legislative reform, not judicial correction, offers the only realistic path to closing the gap section 19 has opened.

II. Legal Framework

A.  The Protective Architecture of the 2017 Act

The Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 defines a ‘minor’, for the purpose of marriage, as a male who has not completed twenty-one years or a female who has not completed eighteen years.[5] Any marriage to which either party is a minor constitutes a ‘child marriage’ under the Act. The statute criminalises every principal actor involved: the adult party who contracts the marriage, the parent or guardian who promotes or permits it, the official who solemnises it, and the registrar who records it, with imprisonment of up to two years and fines of up to one lakh taka.[6] Offences under the Act are cognizable, bailable, and non-compoundable, signalling that Parliament regarded child marriage as a public wrong rather than a private family matter to be resolved between the parties.[7]

B.  Section 19 and Its Rules

Section 19 sits in direct tension with this protective scheme. Its operative language is an overriding clause—‘[n]otwithstanding anything contained in any other provision of this Act’—which then sets three conditions for lawful departure from the minimum-age rule: special circumstances prescribed by rules, a finding by the court that the marriage serves the minor’s best interests, and consent from a parent or guardian. Where these three conditions are met, no offence under the Act arises.[8] Parliament left the term ‘special circumstances’ undefined and delegated its content to subordinate rules. Those rules, in turn, never set out a structured list of qualifying circumstances. What emerged instead, through the practice of implementing officials, was a single working category: teenage pregnancy following a romantic relationship, in cases where the girl has no relative able to care for her.[9] Even at the time the Act was passed, commentators flagged this as a problem: the term doing the most work in the exception had been left undefined in the primary legislation, and the gap has never been closed.[10]

C.  Constitutional Dimension

Section 19 must also be read against the constitutional framework of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Article 27 of the Constitution guarantees equality before the law for all citizens. Article 28(1) prohibits discrimination against any citizen on grounds of sex, and article 28(2) extends that protection specifically to women.[11] Article 28(4) further permits the State to make special provisions for the advancement of women and children, a clause sometimes cited in support of child-protective legislation, but which cannot authorise a provision that removes existing protections from minors.[12] Article 31 guarantees the right to protection of law, encompassing a right not to be subjected to arbitrary legal measures that deprive a person of legal safeguards otherwise available.[13] A provision that strips a minor of criminal-law protections—through a mechanism that generates no judgment, no public record, and no adversarial scrutiny—raises a serious question under article 31 that has not yet been tested before the courts.

D.  International Obligations

The 2017 Act sits within a wider framework of international commitments that predate it by decades. Bangladesh has been a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child since 1990, and the treaty body responsible for interpreting it has taken a consistent line: eighteen should be the minimum marriage age for every child, without carve-outs.[14] A similar commitment flows from CEDAW, which Bangladesh joined in 1984. Article 16(1)(b) of that treaty protects ‘the same right freely to choose a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent’.[15] Domestic policy points the same way. Under the National Plan of Action to End Child Marriage 2018–2030, the Government committed to ending marriage for girls under fifteen in the near term and eliminating child marriage entirely by 2041.[16] Taken together, a treaty obligation, a constitutional guarantee, and a national strategy all point in the same direction: elimination. Section 19 sits awkwardly against that backdrop, since it authorises the very practice the rest of the framework was built to end.

III. Case Law Analysis

A.  Domestic Litigation: The 2025 Writ Petition

Litigation testing section 19 directly has been sparse, and this scarcity is itself analytically significant. Because the provision operates through an ex-ante court order rather than a defence raised after prosecution, the marriages it authorises rarely generate the adversarial record from which appellate scrutiny normally develops.[17]

The absence of litigation is compounded by an absence of data. Neither the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs nor any court administration publishes figures on how many section 19 applications are filed each year, what proportion are granted, or the age and circumstances of the minors involved.[18] This article’s critique of section 19 is accordingly a critique of legal design rather than of measured outcomes; the case made here does not depend on knowing how frequently the provision is invoked, since a mechanism that can authorise child marriage with no floor, no independent consent requirement, and no public record is objectionable on design grounds regardless of the volume of orders it produces. That said, the absence of published figures is not incidental to the argument—it is itself a symptom of the opacity critiqued in Section IV below, and it is precisely this gap that the reporting reform proposed in Section VI is meant to close. The absence of official statistics should not be understood as neutral. Where a legal mechanism permits departures from a statutory prohibition affecting children, transparency itself becomes a safeguard. The lack of publicly available data regarding the number of applications, approvals, and circumstances under which section 19 is invoked prevents meaningful democratic oversight and limits the ability of researchers, policymakers, and courts to assess whether the exception remains genuinely exceptional.

The most significant recent judicial engagement with the 2017 Act concerned a different provision entirely. In a 2025 writ petition before the High Court Division, the petitioner challenged section 18 of the Act, which bars courts from taking cognizance of a child marriage offence more than two years after it occurred.[19] The petitioner argued that this limitation period disadvantages victims who are minors at the time of marriage and who only acquire the capacity to bring a complaint once they reach adulthood, by which point the statutory window has typically closed.[20] The Court issued a rule calling on the Government to justify the provision, signalling judicial willingness to interrogate structural features of the Act that, on their face, weaken its protective purpose.[21]

That willingness has not yet extended, in any reported decision, to section 19 itself. The reasoning in the 2025 petition is nonetheless instructive: it demonstrates that Bangladeshi courts are prepared to treat procedural design choices within the Act as constitutionally suspect where they leave victims without an effective remedy. Section 19 presents an analogous design defect, discussed in Section IV below, yet it has not generated comparable litigation, principally because no defendant exists to resist conviction and no judgment is produced explaining the reasoning applied in any individual case.

B.  Persuasive Foreign Authority: *Independent Thought v Union of India*

Bangladeshi courts are not bound by Indian precedent, but the reasoning of the Supreme Court of India in Independent Thought v Union of India bears directly on the problem section 19 presents.[22] At issue was a clause in the Indian Penal Code that shielded a husband from a rape charge where his wife was aged between fifteen and eighteen, regardless of whether she had consented to intercourse. The Court found the clause arbitrary. Its underlying effect, the judges held, was to legitimise child marriage by placing its most intimate consequence beyond the reach of ordinary rape law.[23] What drove the decision was a single proposition: a child’s protections cannot be switched off by marital status. Solemnising a marriage, however properly done, does not make a child an adult for purposes of consent.[24]

This reasoning translates directly to the Bangladeshi context. India’s own Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 criminalises the same conduct that section 19 of the Bangladeshi Act exempts from criminality, yet contains no equivalent provision permitting a court to pre-authorise the marriage of a minor.[25] The Indian Supreme Court’s insistence that a child’s legal protections cannot be displaced by the fact of marriage stands in direct tension with the logic of section 19, which does precisely that: it removes the protection of the criminal law from a minor on the strength of a marriage the State itself has sanctioned.[26] As a decision of a foreign apex court applying differently worded legislation, Independent Thought is persuasive rather than authoritative before a Bangladeshi court; its value for this article lies in the underlying principle, not in any binding effect.

IV. Critical Evaluation

A.  An Exception That Swallows the Rule

The opening words of section 19 merit close attention. The phrase ‘[n]otwithstanding anything contained in any other provision of this Act’ was not a drafting afterthought—it does real work. Functionally, it switches off every protective mechanism the statute otherwise builds: the minimum age in section 2, the criminal offences in sections 7 to 11, even the prevention committees in section 3.[27] The label ‘exception’ undersells what this clause actually does. A central prohibition that can be switched off by one overriding clause has not been qualified; it has been paired with a second, permissive regime that activates at exactly the moment the first would otherwise bite. This article submits that the resulting incoherence in the 2017 Act traces back to that drafting choice, not merely to weak enforcement.[28]

B.  Undefined Terms and the Absence of a Floor

Two key phrases carry the entire weight of section 19—‘special circumstances’ and ‘best interests of the minor’—and the Act defines neither. The rules that were meant to flesh out the first term never achieved the precision Parliament withheld.[29] This has two consequences. One is that the rules collapse what should be a multi-factor test into a single fact pattern—pregnancy outside marriage—leaving courts and parents with nothing to weigh against it: not the girl’s education, not her own wishes, not whether support short of marriage might exist. The other consequence is graver still: nowhere does section 19 fix a floor below which the exception simply cannot apply.[30] Eighteen operates as an absolute floor everywhere else in the Act. Inside section 19, there is no floor at all—which means that, read literally, the exception could authorise the marriage of a child of any age, so long as a court accepts that the circumstances and best-interests tests have been met.

C.  The Consent Gap

Whose consent does section 19 actually require? Not the minor’s. The provision asks only for her parents or guardian to agree.[31] That gap is hard to square with article 16(1)(b) of CEDAW, under which consent to marriage is a personal right belonging to the party being married—not something her parents can supply on her behalf.[32] The constitutional equality guarantee in articles 27 and 28 raises a similar problem: it is difficult to see why it would not extend to a minor’s right to have a say in a decision that reshapes the rest of her life. As drafted, the provision treats the minor as something decisions are made about, not someone who takes part in making them. The stakes are sharpest precisely because the typical section 19 case involves a pregnant adolescent—and family pressure to marry, whether to the partner involved or, in the worst documented cases, to the person responsible for the pregnancy, can easily diverge from what the girl herself would choose if anyone actually asked her.[33]

D.  Addressing a Symptom in a Way That Entrenches the Disease

Defenders of section 19 do not treat it as a drafting oversight to be quietly repealed; they offer an affirmative case for retaining it, built on three linked premises. The first is protective: a pregnant unmarried minor with no means of support faces an acute and immediate welfare crisis, and marriage to the man involved can give her and her child a recognised legal status and a household, where the alternative may be a continued pregnancy with no family or institutional support in place at all.[34] The second is reputational: an unmarried pregnancy carries severe social stigma in a society that places a high premium on family honour, and on this view marriage shields both the girl and her wider family from an ostracism that can otherwise last a lifetime and extend to siblings’ own marriage prospects. The third is material: families invoke section 19 out of concern for security in the broadest sense—financial provision for a daughter who might otherwise be considered unmarriageable, and the family’s own standing and economic position within the community, both of which an unmarried pregnancy can place at risk. On this telling, section 19 is not a loophole but a pragmatic accommodation: it allows the legal system to respond to a hard case that an absolute minimum-age rule cannot accommodate, without driving the underlying conduct entirely outside the law’s reach and beyond any oversight at all.

A further argument advanced in favour of section 19 is that abolishing the exception may unintentionally drive vulnerable families toward unregistered religious marriages conducted outside formal legal processes. Proponents contend that judicial oversight, even if imperfect, is preferable to a situation in which child marriages occur entirely beyond the reach of state institutions. This concern deserves serious consideration, although it ultimately raises questions about enforcement capacity rather than the desirability of maintaining a legal exception itself.

Each of these arguments contains a kernel of truth that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed: a pregnant unmarried minor with nobody able to support her is in real trouble, and for her family, marriage can look like the safest available option. Taking the concern seriously is not the same as accepting the provision as drafted, however, for two reasons. The first is one of fit: none of the three premises actually requires marriage as the remedy, as opposed to the underlying welfare, anti-stigma, or financial support that the premises identify as the real need. If what is missing is support for pregnant minors—healthcare, a guarantee that schooling continues, social protection—then the fix is to build that support. Turning marriage into the State-sanctioned answer to a crisis the State itself failed to prevent is not a fix; it is a substitute for one.

There is a second answer too, and the comparative material in Section V below supplies it: States that decline to legalise the marriage have still found ways to address the underlying hardship. Declining a pre-authorisation pathway does not mean abandoning pregnant minors—it means building welfare responses around the actual problem, rather than treating an unregistered pregnancy as the thing that needs fixing. Section 19, by contrast, offers marriage as the remedy for unwanted pregnancy, which risks teaching that early marriage is the natural response to early sexual activity rather than one outcome among several—and not the one most likely to keep a girl in school and out of a union she may never have chosen.

E.  Rule of Law Concerns

A central component of the rule of law is that legal powers must be exercised according to clear and predictable standards. Section 19 provides no statutory definition of either “special circumstances” or the “best interests of the minor.” The absence of objective criteria risks inconsistent decision-making and leaves substantial discretion in the hands of courts and administrative actors. Such indeterminacy raises concerns regarding arbitrariness, which sits uneasily with constitutional commitments to equality before the law and the protection of law guaranteed under Articles 27 and 31 of the Constitution.

V. Comparative Perspectives    

India and Malawi have been selected because both jurisdictions have confronted persistent child marriage challenges while adopting markedly different legislative responses. The comparison is therefore illustrative rather than exhaustive, intended to demonstrate that alternative regulatory models remain available even in contexts where child marriage is deeply embedded in social practice.       

A.  India: Voidability Rather Than Pre-Authorisation

India offers a useful point of comparison. Its Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 criminalises the same conduct as the Bangladeshi Act—contracting, promoting, or solemnising a child marriage.[35] What it lacks, by contrast, is any equivalent to section 19: there is no mechanism by which a court can pre-authorise an underage marriage. Where a child marriage occurs anyway, the Indian Act makes it voidable: the party who was a minor at the time can seek to annul it once she reaches adulthood.[36] Put differently, the Indian model accepts that the statutory ban will sometimes be broken, but it refuses to bless any of those marriages in advance. The choice belongs to the minor herself, once she is old enough to make it—which is a fundamentally different allocation of power from section 19, where a court and a set of parents decide the question while the minor is still a child and has no real say in the matter.

India’s experience shows something else too: that courts can close a loophole the legislature leaves open. Independent Thought, discussed above in Section III, is the clearest example.[37] That outcome was possible because the relevant Indian provision generated continuous criminal litigation in which the exception’s validity could be tested by an adversarial process. Section 19 of the Bangladeshi Act, operating instead as a pre-authorisation mechanism with no equivalent flow of contested cases, has not generated the same opportunity for judicial correction. This reinforces the case for legislative rather than judicial reform in Bangladesh.

B.  Malawi: Closing Rather Than Codifying the Loophole

Malawi offers an instructive contrast. In February 2017—the same year Bangladesh enacted section 19—Malawi’s Parliament unanimously passed Constitutional Amendment Act No 36, removing from its Constitution a provision that had permitted children aged fifteen to eighteen to marry with parental consent, thereby aligning the minimum marriage age with the 2015 Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Act. Human rights organisations noted the juxtaposition: one country eliminating a loophole at the precise moment another was writing one into statute.[38] Nine years on, section 19 remains on the books, and international monitoring bodies confirm that Bangladesh must accelerate progress against child marriage by twenty-two times to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal and eight times faster to reach its own 2041 national target.[39] Malawi’s experience is worth dwelling on for one reason above all: it demonstrates that a country confronting a comparably severe child marriage problem can choose to abolish a loophole rather than codify one, and that nothing about the legal or political reality makes that choice impossible.

VI. Conclusion

This article has demonstrated that section 19 of the Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 is not a narrow safety valve but a structural fault line running through an otherwise protective statute. The provision overrides the Act’s central prohibition, leaves its key terms undefined, fixes no minimum age, requires no consent from the minor herself, and operates entirely outside the public record in a manner that forecloses meaningful constitutional review. The comparative experiences of India and Malawi demonstrate that none of these features is inevitable: a State can criminalise child marriage comprehensively while still responding humanely to the pressures—such as adolescent pregnancy—that section 19 was designed to address.

The thesis advanced throughout this article is accordingly confirmed: section 19 licences precisely the conduct the remainder of the Act was enacted to prevent, in a manner that is insulated from judicial correction and arguably inconsistent with Bangladesh’s constitutional commitments to equality and the rule of law, though that constitutional question has yet to be tested before a Bangladeshi court. Three reforms would address these defects. First, Parliament should define ‘special circumstances’ exhaustively and fix an absolute minimum age, the Act should require courts to ascertain the minor’s own independent, informed consent, obtained separately from parental consent and with the assistance of a trained child welfare officer.[40] Third, the Government should mandate systematic, anonymised public reporting of every section 19 order, enabling Parliament, civil society, and international monitoring bodies to assess whether the exception is in fact confined to the limited circumstances its drafters intended.

Until such reforms are adopted, the Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 will continue to protect and to permit child marriage in the same breath and a Constitution that guarantees equality before the law will remain unable to fulfil that promise for the very children it was designed to shield. At stake is not merely the interpretation of a single statutory provision but the broader question of whether child protection legislation can remain credible when it simultaneously prohibits and authorises the very conduct it seeks to eliminate.

References and Bibliography

Primary Sources — Legislation

Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 (Bangladesh), Act No VI of 2017.

Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 (Bangladesh/British India), Act No XIX of 1929 (repealed).

Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 (India), Act No 6 of 2007.

Constitutional Amendment Act No 36 of 2017 (Malawi).

Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Act 2015 (Malawi).

Constitution of Bangladesh 1972, arts 27, 28 and 31.

Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted 20 November 1989, entered into force 2 September 1990) 1577 UNTS 3.

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted 18 December 1979, entered into force 3 September 1981) 1249 UNTS 13.

Primary Sources — Cases

Independent Thought v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 800 (Supreme Court of India).

Primary Sources — Government and Institutional Documents

Ministry of Women and Children Affairs (Bangladesh), National Plan of Action to End Child Marriage 2018–2030 (2018).

UNICEF Bangladesh, ‘Child Marriage’ <https://www.unicef.org/bangladesh/en/topics/child-marriage> accessed 20 June 2026.

UNICEF Bangladesh, ‘UNFPA and UNICEF Renew Their Pledge to Support Bangladesh in Ending Child Marriage’ (14 December 2024) <https://www.unicef.org/bangladesh/en/press-releases/unfpa-and-unicef-renew-their-pledge-support-bangladesh-ending-child-marriage> accessed 20 June 2026.

UNICEF Bangladesh, ‘Accelerated Action Needed to End Child Marriage in Bangladesh by 2030’ (October 2020) <https://www.unicef.org/bangladesh/en/press-releases/accelerated-action-needed-end-child-marriage-bangladesh-2030> accessed 20 June 2026.

UNFPA Bangladesh, ‘Child Marriage’ <https://bangladesh.unfpa.org/en/topics/child-marriage> accessed 20 June 2026.

Human Rights Watch, ‘Malawi Amends Constitution to Remove Child Marriage Loophole’ (24 February 2017) <https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/02/24/malawi-amends-constitution-remove-child-marriage-loophole> accessed 20 June 2026.

Girls Not Brides, Malawi: Closing the Loophole on Child Marriage (Girls Not Brides 2017) <https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/documents/705/Malawi-case-study-template-19.12-FINAL.pdf> accessed 20 June 2026.

Secondary Sources

Begum F, ‘A Theoretical Examination of the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2017 in Bangladesh’ (2018) 12(1) Islamic University Studies 145.

Khan MT and others, ‘Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 to Practise No Restraint’ Dhaka Tribune (Dhaka, 28 February 2017).

‘HC Questions Legality of Two-Year Limit on Filing Child Marriage Cases’ Dhaka Tribune (Dhaka, 2 November 2025) <https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/court/395404/hc-questions-legality-of-two-year-limit-on-filing> accessed 20 June 2026.

‘Necessity to Reform the Child Marriage Restraint Act’ The Daily Star (Dhaka, 13 July 2023) <https://www.thedailystar.net/law-our-rights/news/necessity-reform-the-child-marriage-restraint-act-3368546> accessed 20 June 2026.

‘The Ghost of “Special Circumstance” Provision’ The Daily Star (Dhaka, 8 April 2017).

Polavarapu A and Akter F, ‘Condoning Child Marriage in Bangladesh: A Step Backwards’ (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 20 April 2023) <https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/condoning-child-marriage-in-bangladesh-a-step-backwards/> accessed 20 June 2026.

Yasmin T, ‘A Review of the Effectiveness of the New Legal Regime to Prevent Child Marriages in Bangladesh: Call for Law Reform’ (Plan International Bangladesh and Girls Not Brides Bangladesh, September 2020) <https://reliefweb.int/report/bangladesh/review-effectiveness-new-legal-regime-prevent-child-marriages-bangladesh-call-law> accessed 20 June 2026.

[1]UNFPA Bangladesh, ‘Child Marriage’ <https://bangladesh.unfpa.org/en/topics/child-marriage> accessed 20 June 2026, reporting 47 per cent of girls aged 18–24 married before their 18th birthday, the highest rate in South Asia; UNICEF Bangladesh, ‘Child Marriage’ <https://www.unicef.org/bangladesh/en/topics/child-marriage> accessed 20 June 2026.

[2]Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 (Bangladesh), Act No VI of 2017, preamble and s 21(1), repealing the Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 (Act No XIX of 1929).

[3]Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 (Bangladesh), s 19.

[4]Aparna Polavarapu and Farzana Akter, ‘Condoning Child Marriage in Bangladesh: A Step Backwards’ (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 20 April 2023) <https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/condoning-child-marriage-in-bangladesh-a-step-backwards/> accessed 20 June 2026.

[5]Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 (Bangladesh), ss 2(1), (3) and (4).

[6]ibid ss 7–11.

[7]ibid s 14. Note that offences under the Act are cognizable and non-compoundable but bailable, as confirmed by Polavarapu and Akter (n 4) and ‘Necessity to Reform the Child Marriage Restraint Act’ The Daily Star (Dhaka, 13 July 2023).

[8]Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 (Bangladesh), s 19 (emphasis added).

[9]Polavarapu and Akter (n 4); Taslima Yasmin, ‘A Review of the Effectiveness of the New Legal Regime to Prevent Child Marriages in Bangladesh: Call for Law Reform’ (Plan International Bangladesh and Girls Not Brides Bangladesh, September 2020) 32.

[10]‘The Ghost of “Special Circumstance” Provision’ The Daily Star (Dhaka, 8 April 2017) accessed 20 June 2026.

[11]Constitution of Bangladesh 1972, arts 27, 28(1) and (2).

[12]ibid art 28(4).

[13]ibid art 31.

[14]Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted 20 November 1989, entered into force 2 September 1990) 1577 UNTS 3, art 1; UNICEF Bangladesh, ‘Child Marriage’ (n 1), noting Bangladesh’s ratification in 1990.

[15]Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted 18 December 1979, entered into force 3 September 1981) 1249 UNTS 13, art 16(1)(b).

[16]Ministry of Women and Children Affairs (Bangladesh), National Plan of Action to End Child Marriage 2018–2030 (2018); UNICEF Bangladesh, ‘Accelerated Action Needed to End Child Marriage in Bangladesh by 2030’ (UNICEF Bangladesh, October 2020) <https://www.unicef.org/bangladesh/en/press-releases/accelerated-action-needed-end-child-marriage-bangladesh-2030> accessed 20 June 2026.

[17]‘HC Questions Legality of Two-Year Limit on Filing Child Marriage Cases’ Dhaka Tribune (Dhaka, 2 November 2025) <https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/court/395404/hc-questions-legality-of-two-year-limit-on-filing> accessed 20 June 2026.

 [19]Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 (Bangladesh), s 18.

[20]Dhaka Tribune (n 17).

[21]ibid.

[22]Independent Thought v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 800 (SC of India).

[23]ibid [71]–[75].

[24]ibid [73].

[25]Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 (India), Act No 6 of 2007, s 3.

[26]As a decision of a foreign apex court interpreting differently worded legislation, Independent Thought carries persuasive rather than binding weight before Bangladeshi courts.

[27]Yasmin (n 9) 33.

[28]ibid 32–33.

[29]Ferdousi Begum, ‘A Theoretical Examination of the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2017 in Bangladesh’ (2018) 12(1) Islamic University Studies 145, 151–152.

[30]ibid 152; Polavarapu and Akter (n 4).

[31]Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 (Bangladesh), s 19.

[32]CEDAW (n 15) art 16(1)(b).

[33]Mohammad Tanzimuddin Khan and others, ‘Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 to Practise No Restraint’ Dhaka Tribune (Dhaka, 28 February 2017) accessed 20 June 2026.

[34]Polavarapu and Akter (n 4); Yasmin (n 9) 36.

[35]Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 (India), s 3.

[36]ibid s 3; Yasmin (n 9) 38.

[37]Independent Thought (n 21).

[38]Human Rights Watch, ‘Malawi Amends Constitution to Remove Child Marriage Loophole’ (24 February 2017) <https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/02/24/malawi-amends-constitution-remove-child-marriage-loophole> accessed 20 June 2026; Girls Not Brides, Malawi: Closing the Loophole on Child Marriage (Girls Not Brides 2017) <https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/documents/705/Malawi-case-study-template-19.12-FINAL.pdf> accessed 20 June 2026.

[39]UNICEF Bangladesh, ‘UNFPA and UNICEF Renew Their Pledge to Support Bangladesh in Ending Child Marriage’ (14 December 2024) <https://www.unicef.org/bangladesh/en/press-releases/unfpa-and-unicef-renew-their-pledge-support-bangladesh-ending-child-marriage> accessed 20 June 2026, noting that Bangladesh must accelerate efforts 22 times to meet the SDG 2030 target and 8 times faster to meet its 2041 national target.

[40]Yasmin (n 9) 49; Begum (n 28) 155.