When Punjab’s assembly raised the minimum marriage age to 18 on Monday, it finally parted ways with a century of complacency. The Child Marriage Restraint Bill 2026 closes the gender gap in the 1929 law and criminalises underage unions: adults who contract them face up to three years in prison and fines of Rs500,000, while those who facilitate or solemnise such marriages are also liable to punishment. In this context, the symbolism of a Muslim-majority legislature choosing to criminalise child marriage is a rare and necessary victory.
The bill also imposes strict timelines, requiring courts to conclude cases within ninety days and allowing judges to halt an impending wedding. Sindh has already enforced an 18-year minimum since 2014, and Balochistan followed last year, but other provinces still cling to the 1929 statute, where girls may be married at sixteen. Punjab’s act promises to end this within its borders, though harmonisation at a federal level remains elusive.
In committee hearings, a legislator argued that Islamic law permits marriage at puberty and that destitute parents marry off daughters for protection. The Council of Islamic Ideology has similarly objected to statutory age limits. Such positions ignore constitutional guarantees of equality.
We would do well to remember how this year, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that Maria Shahbaz, a 13-year-old Christian girl abducted in Lahore in 2025, could stay with the man she was allegedly forced to marry after accepting the argument that she had reached puberty.
Lawmakers and rights advocates say such cases expose a dangerous gap in which abduction, conversion and marriage can be made to look lawful once a child is placed beyond her family’s reach.
At the end of the day, laws matter only when the police file cases instead of mediating between families, and when communities treat education as more valuable than patriarchal control over a girl’s sexuality. Parliament should make the ordinance permanent. Pakistan also needs a frank conversation about forced conversions and the resulting marriages.
This law is no imported culture war. It is a corrective rooted in Islamic principles of justice and the constitutional promise of equality. The real question, henceforth, is whether Pakistan will enforce its own laws for every child, for good. *