FMT - No child can consent to marriage, Latheefa tells Wan Azizah (extracts):
It doesn't need a lawyer like Latheefa Koya to point out that Wan Azizah has been grossly incorrect in saying a 15-year old girl could give her consent to her marriage to a 44-year old man. Even layman kaytee has already pointed that out in my FB posting yesterday.
(1) DPM cum Women Minister is useless.
PETALING JAYA: PKR’s Latheefa Koya has continued grilling Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail over the issue of underage marriage, taking the women, family and community development minister to task for saying the 15-year-old child bride in the latest case in Kelantan had consented to her marriage to a 44-year-old man.
Calling the statement “unacceptable” and “breathtakingly irresponsible”, Latheefa, who heads rights group Lawyers for Liberty (LFL), said it was a fundamental principle that children were incapable of consenting to marriage.
“Criminal law regards consensual sex with any girl below 16 as rape precisely because a child is not capable of consent,” she said in a statement today.
She added that Wan Azizah, who is also deputy prime minister, appeared to have overlooked the “pressure, persuasion or coercion the child may have been subjected to by the perpetrator and other persons over the period of several months prior to the marriage”.
She also accused Wan Azizah of drawing “slapdash conclusions” from a “one-day investigation by some random officials from the women’s ministry”.
Calling the statement “unacceptable” and “breathtakingly irresponsible”, Latheefa, who heads rights group Lawyers for Liberty (LFL), said it was a fundamental principle that children were incapable of consenting to marriage.
“Criminal law regards consensual sex with any girl below 16 as rape precisely because a child is not capable of consent,” she said in a statement today.
She added that Wan Azizah, who is also deputy prime minister, appeared to have overlooked the “pressure, persuasion or coercion the child may have been subjected to by the perpetrator and other persons over the period of several months prior to the marriage”.
She also accused Wan Azizah of drawing “slapdash conclusions” from a “one-day investigation by some random officials from the women’s ministry”.
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she has let lil' Muslim girls down |
“The 15-year-old victim needs urgent care, counselling and support. A public statement from the minister whitewashing the ‘marriage’ does not help the child at all.”
News of the girl’s marriage which took place in July with the consent of a shariah court came three months after the uproar caused by another underage marriage, in which a 41-year-old rubber tapper took an 11-year-old girl as his third wife.
News of the girl’s marriage which took place in July with the consent of a shariah court came three months after the uproar caused by another underage marriage, in which a 41-year-old rubber tapper took an 11-year-old girl as his third wife.
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unprotected by both Islamic and secular laws, ravished at only 15 years of age |
It doesn't need a lawyer like Latheefa Koya to point out that Wan Azizah has been grossly incorrect in saying a 15-year old girl could give her consent to her marriage to a 44-year old man. Even layman kaytee has already pointed that out in my FB posting yesterday.
I don't want critics coming out to say Latheefa Koya is a member of PKR's Dökkálfar Dwarfs, thus she is biased. That is the silly blind-as-bat mafulat-ish moronic mumbling - equivalent to saying OTOH that it' OK for Lim KS to wallop a resigning Gerakan's Mah Siew Keong. We should instead study what Latheefa has said about this issue, and judge whether she has a point?
Ask you, has Wan Azizah fibbed in saying the 15-year old girl gave her consent to the marriage?
The irresponsibility of Wan Azizah as Women Minister in child marriages has been consistently outrageous, shameful, and hideously irresponsible, drawing even condemnation from the UN.
Wan Azizah, to reiterate, is a useless Women Minister who is grossly incompetent and incapable of looking after the protection and interests of lil' girls in the East Coast who have been and will be preyed upon by middle-age predatory paedophiles, or worse, she couldn't care less.
She should resign with immediate effect and if the Mahathir-government refuses to make non-Muslim Hannah Yeoh the Women Minister, then to fCks with only a woman becoming the Women Minister - let's make Zaid Ibrahim the first male Women Minister instead wakakaka (though I suspect that Najib might have been once the Women Minister - I could be incorrect).
Alternatively, there's Wan Azizah's most ardent critic on child marriages, Latheefa Koya. She is a woman, Muslim, lawyer and a member of the lawyers for Liberty - make her the new Women Minister.
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