Attached is the document of the CEDAW Committee to the List of issues and questions in relation to its seventh periodic report of Nepal.

Nepal – Consideration of Lower Marriage Age & Legalization of Polygamy

Nepal, Aug. 5, 2025 – News on two proposed laws about marriage in Nepal are currently doing the rounds on social media. At the centre of these discussions are women. The government has initiated a process to revise existing laws to lower the minimum marriage age from 20 years to 18 years. Plus, the Cabinet is drafting a bill to legalise polygamy by compelling a married man to marry for a second time if he is found to have had an extramarital affair resulting in the birth of an illegitimate child.

There is no silver lining to these recently proposed laws. Both of them are regressive for women, especially the one legalising polygamy. It is unjust on married women to suddenly have to share her husband with another woman as the husband was not satisfied with the marriage. The opinion of women, the social group most impacted by the proposed laws, has been discarded. If the views of the women lawmakers of the ruling coalition were not considered before the laws were drafted, the voice of the common women of the country was surely neither prioritised nor accommodated in the controversial provisions in the proposed bills. This smells of toxic patriarchy.

This brings us to the main question: What is the purpose behind these marriage-related proposals? The government must take the perspective of women into account if it wants to revise the marriage laws. Legalising polygamy is not the way forward. There are alternatives to address the issues of the legal illegitimacy of children born out of extramarital affairs. Married women are already subjected to multiple unfair practices stemming from marriage, from the compulsion to quit their careers to take care of the family, to domestic abuse. The government should not heap more misery on them by pushing the proposed revisions to marriage laws.

WUNRN

No to polygamy