Apostolic sect sued for practicing child marriages

Apostolic sect sued for practicing child marriages

By Letwin Mubonesi

Following the death of a 14-year-old girl, Annah Machaya who after giving birth at a church shrine, Precious Nyaradzo Musarurwa, Linda Masarira and Munyaradzi Midzi, through their lawyer Ms Jacqueline Sande, have launched the suit at the Constitutional Court seeking urgent alignment of the Marriages Act and the Customary Marriages Act with the Constitution within six months to protect girls under 18.

The incident has brought forward the practice of child marriage within Zimbabwe’s apostolic churches, which also allow polygamy.

The United Nations has also condemned the practise of child marriages.

Johanne Marange Apostolic Church has the doctrine of marrying off young girls and covering up alleged sexual abuse among congregants.

This is now coming to an end after gender activists sued the church and its high priest, Noah Taguta for violating girls and women’s rights.

Zimbabwe has two sets of marriage laws, the Marriage Act and Customary Marriages Act.

Neither law gives a minimum age for marriage consent, while the customary law allows polygamy.

The Ministers of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage, Minister of Women Affairs and Minister of Small and Medium Enterprises Development were also listed as the respondents in the lawsuit together with attorney general of Zimbabwe.

The activists seek to push the government into expediting the amendment of the marriage laws to criminalise child marriages and intimacy involving children before the age of consent.

Perpetrators should be given hard punishment and in their application they argued that the church’s doctrine is unlawful and any member caught on the wrong side of the law should be arrested and punished.

They argued that this sect’s doctrine takes advantages of young women and girls and forces them to get into early child marriages and sexual activities without their consent.

They are forced into being child bearing machines at a tender age.

They said that the unconstitutionality of such practises by religious sects like Johanne Marange Apostolic Church affect girls and women as well as depriving them of their rights.

“The existence of child marriages should be blamed on the government which did not speed up the alignment process.”

Five years ago, the Constitutional Court outlawed marriage of children under the age of 18 but the age of sexual consent in terms of the Criminal Law Codification Reform Act remained at 16 and the activists argued that it should be raised to 18 years.

The existence and rampancy of cases of child marriages is a clear sign that there is need for a law to protect girls and women against such vices.

However, government through the attorney general’s civil division argued that the order being sought is incompetent because parliament was already dealing with the alignment of the laws in question.